The Atacama Desert is the driest place on the planet.

And one of the most inhospitable.

But salt lagoons dot the barren landscape and they have given life.

Laguna Chaxa lies in the salt flats, 7,500 feet above sea level. 

Its crystal waters reflect the horizon, the never-ending terrain of salt rocks. The rows of volcanoes that line the Andes mountains to the East. 

In this lagoon, two species thrive. Brine shrimp and flamingos. The miniature shrimp multiply quickly, feeding on the phytoplankton packed with beta carotene, like carrots. The flamingos feed on the shrimp, which colors their feathers pink.

Growing the flamingo’s family tree is harder.

Raising an egg under the incessant sun is not easy.

Like penguins in the frigid extremes, the flamingos here lay just one egg a year.

And there is a battle to see which predator will get to it first. The foxes, which creep down off the hillsides, or the heat of the sun, which can cook it if left to the elements. 

So the flamingos have learned to adapt.

They build bowl-shaped nests of mud and earth in the shallow waters of the lake. 

The salty waters keep the foxes away, and cool the egg, despite the hot sun.

The baby flamingo grows inside the half-submerged egg.

But even then the parents keep watch.

If the egg is too hot, they fan it with their wings or block the sun’s rays with their bodies, shading it.

They have only one young a year. It must count. 

“If it dies, the mother, heartbroken, walks into the desert and dies too,” says Ingrid, an Indigenous guide from the local Toconao community that keeps watch over the region.

And then the egg hatches, the white feathered baby breaks free into the salty waters that she and her family have called home for thousands of years.

Perfectly adapted and resisting in one of the harshest ecosystems on Earth.

###

Thanks for listening. I’m your host, Michael Fox.

This story might seem a little out of place for this podcast. But coming just days after Earth Day, I wanted to highlight this just incredible lifelong resistance from animals and ecosystems all around us, to adapt and hold on as best one can. I really like this one. Also… April 26 is Flamingo Day. So happy Flamingo Day. Seeing them in action in these incredibly harsh climates of Chile and Peru, I have new found respect for these big pink birds. They are NOT just Florida lawn decor.

This is episode 24 of Stories of Resistance—a podcast co-produced by The Real News and Global Exchange. Independent investigative journalism, supported by Global Exchange’s Human Rights in Action program. Each week, we’ll bring you stories of resistance like this. Inspiration for dark times.

If you like what you hear, please subscribe, like, share, comment, or leave a review. You can also follow my reporting and support at patreon.com/mfox.

There you can also check out some exclusive pictures of the flamingos at Laguna Chaxa, taken both by myself and my daughter. I’ll add links in the show notes. 

See you next time.

The Atacama Desert is the driest place on the planet, and one of the most inhospitable. But salt lagoons dot the barren landscape, and flamingos are one of a number of species that have adapted to live in this harsh environment, and are battling to survive.

This is episode 24 of Stories of Resistance—a podcast co-produced by The Real News and Global Exchange. Independent investigative journalism, supported by Global Exchange’s Human Rights in Action program. Each week, we’ll bring you stories of resistance like this. Inspiration for dark times.

This week, we celebrate Earth Day, April 22. April 26 is also Flamingo Day. So, Happy Flamingo Day!

You can see exclusive pictures of the flamingos of the Atacama desert, in Michael Fox’s Patreon page. You can also follow Michael’s reporting and support at patreon.com/mfox.

If you like what you hear, please subscribe, like, share, comment, or leave a review.
Written and produced by Michael Fox.

The trail leads across the vast horizon 

traversing sharp green slopes.

A row of travelers walks on an overgrown path of stone

chiseled half a millenium ago into the hillside.

Thousands of feet above the valley floor

thousands of feet above the snaking brown Urubamba River

craggy snow-covered 17-, 18-, 19,000-foot peaks reach toward the heavens.

They are not just mountains. 

They’re Apus. 

The word means “señor,” “elder,” or “the honored ones” in Quechua. 

For the Andean Quechuan people, the apus are spirits that embody the mountains.

Spirits that protect them and their harvests.

And this group of travelers is also going to pay their respects to the ancient ones.

The path takes a sharp ascent and winds up over a pass. 

And at the top they stop, 12,000 feet up.

Here…  the land was terraced hundreds of years ago, by ancient bygone people. 

Maybe the Incas. Maybe the Killke or Qotacalla people before them.

The land is still farmed today.

But it’s barren of trees and shrubs. They were long since cut, and cleared and used.

But people in the Andes of Peru are changing that.

The guide wears a traditional red woven Andean poncho.

He sets his llamas to graze on the lush green hillside

And pulls from their packs saplings. Tiny queñua trees — polylepis, in English.

They are native to Peru.

To the highlands and the hillsides here. They thrive in the high altitudes.

They help protect the soil. They conserve water.

They are sacred. And this team is here to plant them on the edge of the ridge where they will grow big and strong.

The team breaks into the ground with a pickaxe and shovel.

They pull out the rich moist earth. 

And then say prayers to the Apus

three coca leaves in hand, blowing sacred breaths to the mountain spirits. 

In every direction they turn, saying a prayer to the mighty summits that surround them… Pitusiray, Sahuasiray, Verónica, Chicón and all of the others, even those they cannot see.

In the base of each hole where the tree will be planted, they make an offering.

Coca leaves, crackers, candy, and other sweets. 

The things that humans like, they say, are the same to be offered to Pachamama, Mother Earth, and the Apus.

The items are arranged in a gorgeous multicolored design.

And then they pour in beer. It fizzes and mixes. 

More prayers in Quechua. A moment of silence.

They ask that these trees may grow roots.

Big and strong. That they may give life

and protect this sacred place. 

The tree is a metaphor for their own future.

That the Apus may bless these little saplings and also their path ahead.

Their community. Their families and endeavours.

And then… they gently fill up the holes with the rich dark earth 

llama dung for fertilizer

brown tufts of Andean grass to hold in the moisture.

More words of prayer on this ancient hillside.

Tiny trees being planted and born.

Dreams. Hope for what may come. 

Resisting on the high mountains of the Andes.

Planting trees for tomorrow. 

###

There has been a huge push to plant these trees and other native trees across the Andes in recent years. And it’s been a tremendous success.

In recent years, local organizations, together with dozens of Indigenous communities have planted more than 10 million trees up and down the Andes. Almost half of them in the Peruvian mountains around Cusco. Many of the tree species are threatened. And many of the ecosystems at risk.

The trees help to protect and preserve the local environments and ecosystems and in particular help retain water. The communities are also holding on to their local cultures, beliefs and religion. Making offerings and prayers to Pachamama and the Apus. Offerings for the resistance of their peoples on the hillsides of the Andes. Offerings for their children and their communities. Offerings for the future.

This is episode 23 of Stories of Resistance — a podcast co-produced by The Real News and Global Exchange. Independent investigative journalism, supported by Global Exchange’s Human Rights in Action program. Each week, we’ll bring you stories of resistance like this. Inspiration for dark times.

This week, we celebrate Earth Day, April 22. So I thought this was a perfect story to highlight the incredible work Indigenous peoples and communities are doing in the highlands of Peru.

If you like what you hear, please subscribe, like, share, comment, or leave a review. You can also follow my reporting and support at www.patreon.com/mfox.

This is episode 23 of Stories of Resistance — a podcast co-produced by The Real News and Global Exchange. Independent investigative journalism, supported by Global Exchange’s Human Rights in Action program. Each week, we’ll bring you stories of resistance like this. Inspiration for dark times.

This week, we celebrate Earth Day, April 22. This is a perfect story to highlight the incredible work Indigenous peoples and communities are doing in the highlands of Peru.

If you like what you hear, please subscribe, like, share, comment, or leave a review. You can also follow Michael’s reporting and support at patreon.com/mfox.

Many thanks to Andean Discovery for allowing me to accompany this trek and tree planting. To find out more, or to book a tour, you can visit andeandiscovery.com.

Written and produced by Michael Fox.

As the climate crisis escalates, a just and rapid transition to renewable energy might seem like the obvious solution. Yet somehow, fossil fuel expansion always remains on the agenda. Environmental activist and author Bill McKibben joins Inequality Watch to expose the network of carbon guzzling billionaires manipulating our media to keep our planet warming and their pockets flush with oil and gas profits.

Produced by: Taya Graham, Stephen Janis
Studio Production: David Hebden, Cameron Granadino
Post-Production: Adam Coley
Written by: Stephen Janis

Transcript

Taya Graham:  Hello, my name is Taya Graham, and welcome to our show, The Inequality Watch. You may know me and my reporting partner, Stephen Janis, for our police accountability reporting. Well, this show is similar except, in this case, our job is to hold billionaires and extremely wealthy individuals accountable. And to do so, we don’t just focus on the bad behavior of a single billionaire. Instead, we examine the system that makes the extreme hoarding of wealth possible.

And today we’re going to unpack a topic that is extremely unpopular with most billionaires. It also might not seem like the most likely topic for a story about inequality, but I think when we explain it and talk to our guests, you might find there’s more to it than meets the eye.

I’m talking about the future of renewable energy and how it could impact your life. And now wait, before you say, Taya, you’re crazy, I mean, Elon Musk builds electric cars. How do you know billionaires don’t like green energy? Well, just give me a second. I think the way we approach this topic will not be what you expect. That’s because there’s a huge invisible media ecosystem that has been constructed around the idea that green energy is somehow too expensive or useless — Or, even worse yet, a conspiracy to fill liberal elite politico coffers.

But what if that’s not true? What if it’s not just fault, but patently, vehemently untrue? If you believe the right-wing media ecosystem, we’re apparently destined to spend tens of thousands of dollars to purchase and then tens of thousands to maintain gas-guzzling cars for the rest of our lives. We’ll inevitably be forced to pay higher and higher utility bills to pay for gas, oil, and coal that will enrich the wealthiest who continue to extract it.

But I just want you to consider an alternative. What if, in fact, the opposite is true? What if renewables could finally and for once, and I really mean for once, actually benefit the working people of this country? What if solar, for example, keeps getting cheaper and batteries more efficient so that using this energy could be as cheap and as simple as pointing a mirror at the sun? And what about the so-called carbon billionaires who are enriched by burning planet-heating gases while they jet set in private planes burning even more carbon while I’m busy using recycled grocery bags? What if they’ve constructed an elaborate plan to make you believe that electricity from the sun is somehow more costly and less healthy?

And what if that’s all wrong? What if someday your utility bill could be halved? What if you could buy an electric car for one-fifth the price of a gas powered one and leave gas stations and high gas prices behind forever? And what if your life could actually be made easier by a new technology?

Well, there is a massive media ecosystem that wants you to think you are destined to be immersed in carbon. They want you to believe that progress is impossible, and ultimately, that innovation is simply something to be feared, not embraced.

But today we are here to discuss an alternative way of looking at renewable energy, and we’ll be talking to someone who knows more about its potential than anyone. His name is Bill McKibben, and he’s one of the foremost advocates for renewable energy and a leader in the fight against global climate change. Bill McKibben is the founder of Third Act, which organizes people over the age of 60 for action on climate injustice. His 1989 book, The End of Nature, is regarded as the first book for a general audience about climate change, and it’s appeared in over 24 languages. He helped found 350.org, the first global grassroots climate campaign, which has organized protests on every continent — Including Antarctica — For climate change. And he even played a leading role in launching the opposition to big oil pipeline projects like the Keystone XL and the fossil fuel divestment campaign, which has become the biggest anticorporate campaign in history. He’s even won the Gandhi Peace Prize. I cannot wait to speak to this amazing champion.

But before we turn to him, I want to turn to my reporting partner, Stephen Janis, and discuss how issues like renewables fit into the idea of inequality and why it’s important to view it through that lens.

Stephen Janis:  Well, Taya, one of the reasons we wanted to do this show was because I feel like we are living in the reality of the extractive economy that we’ve talked about. And that reality is psychological. Because we have to be extracted from. They’re not going to give us good products or good ways or improve our lives, they’re going to find ways to extract wealth from us.

And this issue, to me, is a perfect example because we’ve been living in this big carbon ecosystem of information, and the dividend has been cynicism. The main priority of the people who fill our minds with the impossibility are the people who really live off the idea of cynicism: nothing works, everything’s broken, technology can’t fix anything, and everything is dystopian.

But I thought when I was thinking about our own lives and how much money we spend to gas up a car, this actually has a possibility to transform the lives of the working class. And that’s why we have to take it seriously and look at it from a different perspective than the way the carbon billionaires want us to. Because the carbon billionaires are spending tons of money to make us think this is impossible.

And I think what we need really, truly is a revolution of competency here. A revolution of idea, a revolution that there are ways to improve our lives despite what the carbon billionaires want us to believe, that nothing works and we all hate each other. And so this, I think, is a perfect topic and a perfect example of that.

Taya Graham:  Stephen, that’s an excellent point.

Stephen Janis:  Thank you.

Taya Graham:  It really is. I feel like the entire idea of renewable energy has been sold as a cost rather than a benefit, and that seems intentional to me. It seems like there is an arc to this technology that could literally wipe carbon billionaires off the face of the earth in the sense that the carbon economy is simply less efficient, more costly, and, ultimately, less plentiful.

But before we get to our guest, let me just give one example. And to do so, I’m going to turn to politics in the UK. There, the leader of a reform party, a right-wing populous group that has been gaining power called renewable energy a massive con and pledged to enact laws that would tax solar power and ban — Yes, you heard it right — Ban industrial-scale battery power. But there was an issue: a fellow member of the party in Parliament had just installed solar panels on his farm and had touted it on a website as, you guessed it, a great business decision. The MP Robert Lowe, as The Guardian UK reported, was ecstatic about his investment, touting it as the best way to get low-cost energy. I mean, I don’t know if the word hypocrisy is strong enough to describe this.

Stephen Janis:  Seems inadequate.

Taya Graham:  Yeah, it really does.

But I do think it’s a great place to introduce and bring in our guest, Bill McKibbon. Mr. McKibbon, thank you so much for joining us.

Bill McKibben:  What a pleasure to be with you.

Taya Graham:  So first, please just help me understand how a party could, on one hand, advocate against renewable energy and, on the other, use it profitably? What is motivating what I think could be called hypocrisy?

Bill McKibben:  Well, we’re in a very paradoxical moment here. For a long time, what we would call renewable energy, energy from the sun and the wind, was more expensive. That’s why we talked about it as alternative energy. And we have talked about carbon taxes to make it a more viable alternative and things. Within the last decade, the price of energy from the sun and the wind and the batteries to store that when the sun goes down or the wind drops, the price of that’s been cut about 90%. The engineers have really done their job.

Sometime three or four years ago, we passed some invisible line where it became the cheapest power on the planet. We live on an earth where the cheapest way to make energy is to point a sheet of glass at the sun. So that’s great news. That’s one of the few pieces of good news that’s happening in a world where there’s a lot of bad news happening.

Great news, unless you own an oil well or a coal mine or something else that we wouldn’t need anymore, or if your political party has been tied up with that industry in the deepest ways. Those companies, those people are panicked. That’s why, for instance, in America, the fossil fuel industry spent $455 million on the last election cycle. They know that they have no choice but to try and slow down the transition to renewable energy.

Stephen Janis:  So I mean, how do they always seem to be able to set the debate, though? It always seems like carbon billionaires and carbon interests seem to be able to cast aside renewable energy ideas, and they always seem to be in control of the dialogue. Is that true? And how do they do that, do you think?

Bill McKibben:  Well, I mean, they’re in control of the dialogue the way they are in control of many dialogues in our political life by virtue of having a lot of money and owning TV networks and on and on and on. But in this case, they have to work very hard because renewable energy, especially solar energy, is so cheap and so many people have begun to use it and understand its appeal, that it’s getting harder and harder to stuff this genie back into the bottle.

Look at a place like Germany where last year, 2024, a million and a half Germans put solar panels on the balconies of their apartments. This balcony solar is suddenly a huge movement there. You can just go to IKEA and buy one and stick it up. You can’t do that in this country because our building codes and things make it hard, and the fossil fuel industry will do everything they can to make sure that continues to be the case.

Taya Graham:  Well, I have to ask, given what you’ve told us, what do you think are the biggest obstacles to taking advantage of these technological advances? What is getting in our way and what can we do about it?

Bill McKibben:  Well, look, there are two issues here. One is vested interest and the other is inertia. And these are always factors in human affairs, and they’re factors here. Vested interest now works by creating more inertia. So the fossil fuel industry won the election in 2024. They elected Donald Trump. And Donald Trump in his first day in office declared an energy emergency, saying that we needed to produce more energy, and then he defined energy to exclude wind and solar power; only fossil fuels and nuclear need apply. He’s banned new offshore wind and may, in fact, be trying to interfere with the construction of things that had already been approved and are underway.

So this is hard work to build out a new energy system, but by no means impossible. And for the last two years around the world, it’s been happening in remarkable fashion. Beginning in about the middle of 2023, human beings were putting up a gigawatt’s worth of solar panels every day. A gigawatt’s the rough equivalent of a nuclear or a coal-fired power plant. So every day on their roofs, in solar farms, whatever, people were building another nuclear reactor, it’s just that they were doing it by pointing a sheet of black glass at the great nuclear reactor 93 million miles up in the sky.

Stephen Janis:  Speaking of around the world, I was just thinking, because I’ve been reading a lot, it seems like we’re conceding this renewable future to China a bit. Do you feel like there’s a threat that, if we don’t reverse course, that China could just completely overwhelm us with their advantages in this technology?

Bill McKibben:  I don’t think there’s a threat, I think there’s a guarantee. And in fact, I think in the course of doing this, we’re ceding global leadership overall to the Chinese. This is the most important economic transition that will happen this century. And China’s been in the lead, they’ve been much more proactive here, but the US was starting to catch up with the IRA that Biden passed, and we were beginning to build our own battery factories and so on. And that’s now all called into question by the Trump ascension. I think it will probably rank as one of the stupidest economic decisions in American history.

Taya Graham:  Well, I have to follow that up with this question: Do you think that the current administration can effectively shut down this kind of progress in solar and renewables? And how much do you think the recent freeze in spending can just derail the progress, basically?

Bill McKibben:  So they can’t shut it down, but they can slow it down, and they will. And in this case, time is everything. And that’s because one of, well, the biggest reason that we want to be making this shift is because the climate future of the planet is on the line. And, as you are aware, that climate future is playing out very quickly. Look, the world’s climate scientists have told us we need to cut emissions in half by 2030 to have some chance of staying on that Paris pathway. 2030, by my watch, is four years and 10 months away now. That doesn’t give us a huge amount of time. So the fact that Trump is slowing down this transition is really important.

Now, I think the deepest problem may be that he’s attempting to slow it down, not only in the US, but around the world. He’s been telling other countries that if they don’t buy a lot of us liquified natural gas, then he’ll hit them with tariffs and things like that. So he’s doing his best to impose his own weird views about climate and energy onto the entire planet.

Again, he can’t stop it. The economics of this are so powerful that eventually we’ll run the world on sun and wind — But eventually doesn’t help much with the climate, not when we’re watching the North and the South Poles melt in real time.

Taya Graham:  I just want to follow up with a clip from Russell Vought who was just confirmed the lead to the Office of Management and Budget. And he was giving a speech at the Center for Renewing America. And I just wanted Mr. McKibbon to hear this really quick first and then to have him respond. So let’s just play that clip for him.

[VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]

Russell Vought:  We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they’re increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.

[VIDEO CLIP ENDS]

Taya Graham:  So the reason why I played this for you is because I wanted to know what your concerns would be with the EPA being kneecapped, if not utterly defunded. And just so people understand what the actions are that the EPA takes and the areas that the EPA regulates that protect the public that people just might not be aware of.

Bill McKibben:  I’m old enough to have been in this country before the EPA, and before the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act. They all came together in the early 1970s right on the heels of the first Earth Day and the huge outpouring of Americans into the street. And in those days, you could not breathe the air in many of the cities in this nation without doing yourself damage. And when I was a boy, you couldn’t swim in an awful lot of the rivers, streams, lakes of America. We’ve made extraordinary environmental progress on those things, and we’d begun, finally, to make some halting progress around this even deeper environmental issue of climate change.

But what Mr. Vought is talking about is that that comes at some cost to the people who are his backers: the people in the fossil fuel industry. He doesn’t want rules about clean air, clean water, or a working climate. He wants to… Well, he wants short-term profit for his friends at the long-term expense of everybody in this country and in this world.

Stephen Janis:  It’s interesting because you bring up a point that I think I hear a lot in the right-wing ecosystem, media ecosystems, that, somehow, clean energy is unfairly subsidized by the government. But isn’t it true that carbon interests are subsidized to a great extent, if not more than green energy?

Bill McKibben:  Yes. The fossil fuel subsidy is, of course, enormous and has been for a century or more. That’s why we have things like the oil depletion allowance and on and on and on. But of course, the biggest subsidy to the fossil fuel industry by far is that we just allow them to use our atmosphere as an open sewer for free. There’s no cost to them to pour carbon into the air and heat up the planet. And when we try to impose some cost — New York state just passed a law that’s going to send a bill to big oil for the climate damages — They’re immediately opposed by the industry, and in this case, with the Trump administration on their side, they’ll do everything they can to make it impossible to ever recover any of those costs. So the subsidy to fossil energy dwarfs that to renewable energy by a factor of orders of magnitude.

Stephen Janis:  That’s really interesting because sometimes people try to, like there was a change in the calculation of the cost of each ton of carbon. That’s really a really important kind of way to measure the true impact. You make a really good point, and that is quite expensive when you take a ton of carbon and figure out what the real cost is to society and to our lives. It’s very high.

Bill McKibben:  Well, that cost gets higher, too, all the time. And sometimes people, it’s paid in very concentrated ways — Your neighborhood in Los Angeles burns down and every house goes with it. And sometimes the cost is more spread out. At the moment, anybody who has an insurance policy, a homeowner’s insurance policy in this country, is watching it skyrocket in price far faster than inflation. And that’s because the insurance companies have this huge climate risk to deal with, and they really can’t. That’s why, in many places, governments are becoming insurers of last resort for millions and millions of Americans.

Taya Graham:  I was curious about, since I asked you to rate something within the current Trump administration, I thought it would be fair to ask you to rate the Inflation Reduction Act. I know the current administration is trying to dismantle it, but I wanted your thoughts on this. Do you think it’s been effective?

Bill McKibben:  Yeah, it’s by no means a perfect piece of legislation. It had to pass the Senate by a single vote, Joe Manchin’s vote, and he took more money from the fossil fuel industry than anybody else, so he made sure that it was [loaded] with presence for that industry. So there’s a lot of stupid money in it, but that was the price for getting the wise money, the money that was backing sun and wind and battery development in this country, the money that was helping us begin to close that gap that you described with China. And it’s a grave mistake to derail it now, literally an attempt to send us backwards in our energy policy at a moment when the rest of the world is trying to go in the other direction.

Stephen Janis:  Speaking of that, I wanted to ask you a question from a personal… Our car was stolen and we were trying to get an electric car, but we couldn’t afford it. Why are there electric cars in China that supposedly run about 10,000 bucks, and you want to buy an electric car in this country and it’s like 50, 60, 70, whatever. I know it’s getting cheaper, but why are they cheaper elsewhere and not here?

Bill McKibben:  Well, I mean, first of all, they should not, unless you want a big luxury vehicle, shouldn’t be anything like that expensive even here. I drive a Kia Niro EV, and I’ve done it for years, and you can get it for less than the cost of the average new car in America. [Crosstalk] Chinese are developing beautiful, beautiful EVs, and we’ll never get them because of tariffs. We’re going to try and protect our auto industry — Which would be a reasonable thing to do if in the few years that we were protecting that auto industry, it was being transformed to compete with the Chinese. But Trump has decided he’s going to get rid of the EV mandate. I mean, in his view, in his world, I guess will be the last little island of the internal combustion engines, while everybody else around the world gets to use EVs.

And the thing about EVs is not just that they’re cleaner, it’s that they’re better in every way. They’re much cheaper to operate. They have no moving parts, hardly. I’ve had mine seven years and I haven’t been to the mechanic for anything on it yet. It’s the ultimate travesty of protectionism closing ourselves off from the future.

Taya Graham:  That’s such a shame. And because I feel like people are worried that in the auto industry, that bringing in renewables would somehow harm the autoworkers, it’s just asking them to build a different car. It’s not trying to take away jobs, which I think is really important for people to understand.

Stephen Janis:  Absolutely.

Taya Graham:  But I was curious, there’s a bunch of different types of renewables, I was wondering maybe you could help us understand what advantages solar might have versus what the advantages of wind [are]. Just maybe help us understand the different types of renewables we have.

Bill McKibben:  Solar and wind are beautifully complimentary, and in many ways. The higher in latitude you go, the less sun you get, but the more wind you tend to get. Sun is there during the midday and afternoon, and then when the sun begins to go down, it’s when the wind usually comes up. If you have a period without sun for a few days, it’s usually because a storm system of some kind that’s going through, and that makes wind all the more useful. So these two things work in complement powerfully with each other. And the third element that you need to really make it all work is a good system of batteries to store that power.

And when you get these things going simultaneously, you get enormous change. California last year passed some kind of tipping point. They’d put up enough solar panels and things that, for most of the year, most days, California was able to supply a hundred percent of its electricity renewably for long stretches of the day. And at night when the sun went down, batteries were the biggest source of supply to the grid. That’s a pretty remarkable thing because those batteries didn’t even exist on that grid two or three years ago. This change is happening fast. It’s happening fastest, as we’ve said in China, which has really turned itself into an electro state, if you will, as opposed to a petro state, in very short order. But as I say, California is a pretty good example. And now Texas is putting up more clean energy faster than any other place in the country.

Stephen Janis:  That’s ironic.

Taya Graham:  Yeah. Well, I was wondering, there’s a technology that makes the news pretty often, but I don’t know if it’s feasible, I think it’s called carbon capture or carbon sequestration. I know that the Biden administration had set aside money to bolster it, but does this technology make sense?

Bill McKibben:  These were the gifts to the fossil fuel industry that I was talking about in the IRA. It comes in several forms, but the one I think you’re referring to is that you put a filter on top, essentially, of a coal-fired power plant or a gas-fired power plant and catch the carbon as it comes out of the exhaust stream and then pump it underground someplace and lock it away. You can do it, you just can’t do it economically. Look, it’s already cheaper just to build a solar farm than to have a coal-fired power plant. And once you’ve doubled the price of that coal-fired power plant by putting an elaborate chemistry set on top of it, the only way to do this is with endless ongoing gifts from the taxpayer, which is what the fossil fuel industry would like, but doesn’t make any kind of economic sense.

Stephen Janis:  You just said something very profound there. You said that it’s cheaper to build a solar field than it is to build a coal plant, but why is this not getting through? I feel like the American public doesn’t really know this. Why is this being hidden from us, in many ways?

Bill McKibben:  In one way, it is getting through. Something like 80% of all the new electric generation that went up last year in this country was sun and wind. So utilities and things sort of understand it. But yes, you’re right. And I think the reason is that we still think of this stuff as alternative energy. I think in our minds, it lives like we think of it as the Whole Foods of energy; it’s nice, but it’s pricey. In fact, it’s the Costco of energy; It’s cheap, it’s available in bulk on the shelf, and it’s what we should be turning to. And the fact that utilities and things are increasingly trying to build solar power and whatever is precisely the reason that the fossil fuel industry is fighting so hard to elect people like Trump.

When I told you what California was doing last year, what change it had seen, as a result, California, in 2024, used 25% less natural gas to produce electricity than they had in 2023. That’s a huge change in the fifth largest economy on earth in one year. It shows you what can happen when you deploy this technology. And that’s the reason that the fossil fuel industry is completely freaked out.

Stephen Janis:  By the way, as a person who has tried to shop at Whole Foods, I immediately understood your comparison.

Taya Graham:  I thought that was great. It’s not the Whole Foods of energy, It’s actually the Costco, that’s so great.

Stephen Janis:  There is that perception though, it’s a bunch of latte-drinking liberals who think that this is what we’re trying to get across —

Taya Graham:  Chai latte, matcha latte.

Stephen Janis:  That’s why it’s so important. It’s cheaper! It’s cheaper. Sorry, go ahead —

Taya Graham:  That’s such a great point. We actually try to look for good policy everywhere we go. And we attended a discussion at the Cato Institute, and this is where their energy fellow described how Trump would use a so-called energy emergency to turn over more federal lands to drilling. So I’m just going to play a little bit of sound for you, and let’s take a listen.

[VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]

Speaker 1:  What does work in your mix?

Speaker 2:  So I call it the Joe Dirt approach. Have you seen that scene in the movie where he’s talking to the guy selling fireworks, and the guy has preferences over very specific fireworks, like snakes and sparklers. The quote from Joe Dirt is, “It’s not about you, it’s about the consumer.” So I think, fundamentally, I’m resource neutral. I will support whatever consumers want and are willing to pay for. I think where that comes out in policy is you would remove artificial constraints. So right now we have a lot of artificial constraints from the Environmental Protection Agency on certain power plants, phasing out coal-fire power, for example. So I would hope, and I would encourage a resource-neutral approach, just we will take energy from anybody that wants to supply it and anybody that wants to buy it.

[VIDEO CLIP ENDS]

Stephen Janis:  Mr. McKibben, I still feel like he’s not really resource neutral. Do you trust the Cato Institute on this issue, or what do you think he’s trying to say there?

Bill McKibben:  Well, I mean, I think he’s… The problem, of course, is that we have one set of energy sources [which] causes this extraordinary crisis, the climate crisis. And so it really doesn’t make sense to be trying to increase the amount of oil or coal or whatever that we’re using. That’s why the world has been engaged for a couple of decades now in an effort, a theoretical effort, with some success in some places, to stop using these things. And the right wing in this country has always been triggered by this and has always done what they can to try and bolster the fossil fuel industry. That was always stupid economically just because the costs of climate change were so hot. But now it’s stupid economically because the cost of renewable energy is so low.

Stephen Janis:  Yeah, I mean, the right always purports to be more cost effective, cost conscious or whatever. I just don’t understand it. I would think they’d be greedy or something, or they’d want to make more money. Is it just that renewables ultimately won’t be profitable for them? Or what’s the…

Bill McKibben:  If you think about it, you’re catching an important point there. For all of us who have to use them, renewable energy is cheap, but it’s very hard to make a fortune in renewable energy precisely because it’s cheap. So the CEO of Exxon last year said his company would never be investing in renewable energy because, as he put it, it can’t return above average profits for investors. What he means is you can’t hoard it. You can’t hold it in reserve. The sun delivers energy for free every morning when it rises above the horizon. And for people, that’s great news, and for big oil, that’s terrible news because they’ve made their fortune for a century by, well, by selling you a little bit at a time. You have to write ’em a check every month.

Taya Graham:  Stephen and I came up with this theory about billionaires, that there’s conflict billionaires, for example, the ones who make money from social media; there’s capture billionaires with private equity; and then there’s carbon billionaires. So I was just wondering, we have this massive misinformation ecosystem that seems very much aligned against renewables. Do you have any idea who is funding this antirenewable coalition? Is our theory about the carbon class correct, I guess?

Bill McKibben:  Yes. The biggest oil and gas barons in America are the Koch brothers, they control more refining and pipeline capacity than anybody else. And they’ve also, of course, been the biggest bankrollers of the Republican right for 30 years. They built that series of institutions that, in the end, were the thing that elected Donald Trump and brought the Supreme Court to where it is and so on and so forth. So the linkages like that could not be tighter.

Stephen Janis:  So last question, ending on a positive note. Do you foresee a future where we could run our entire economy on renewables? I’m just going to put it out there and see if you think it’s actually feasible or possible.

Taya Graham:  And if so, how much money could it save us?

Bill McKibben:  People have done this work, a big study at Oxford two years ago, looking at just this question. It concluded that yes, it’s entirely possible to run the whole world on sun, wind, and batteries, and hydropower, and that if you did it, you’d save the world tens of trillions of dollars. You save more the faster you do it simply because you don’t have to keep paying for more fuel. Yes, you have to pay the upfront cost of putting up the solar panel, but after that, there’s no fuel cost. And that changes the equation in huge ways.

We want to get this across. That’s why later this year in September on the fall equinox, we’ll be having this big day of action. We’re going to call it Sun Day, and we’re going to make the effort to really drive home to people what a remarkable place we’re in right now, what a remarkable chance we have to reorient human societies. And in a world where everything seems to be going wrong, this is the thing that’s going right.

Stephen Janis:  Well, just [so you] know, we did buy a used hybrid, which I really love, but I love electric cars. I do want to get an electric car —

Bill McKibben:  Well, make sure you get an e-bike. That’s an even cooler piece of [crosstalk] technology. Oh, really?

Stephen Janis:  Oh, really? OK. Got it. Got it. But thank you so much.

Bill McKibben:  All right, thank you, guys.

Taya Graham:  Thank you so much for your time. We really appreciate you, and we got you out in exactly 40 minutes, so —

Bill McKibben:  [Crosstalk].

Taya Graham:  OK. Thank you so much. It was such a wonderful opportunity to meet you. Thank you so much.

Bill McKibben:  Take care.

Stephen Janis:  Take care.

Taya Graham:  OK, bye.

Wow. I have to thank our incredible guest, Bill McKibben, for his insights and thoughtful analysis. I think this type of discussion is so important to providing you, our viewers, with the facts regarding critical issues that will affect not only your future, but also your loved ones, your children, and your grandchildren. And I know the internet is replete with conspiracy theories about climate change and the technologies that we just discussed, but let’s remember, the real conspiracy might be to convince you that all of this possible progress is somehow bad. That the possibility of cheap, clean energy is what? It’s a plot. It’s a myth.

Stephen, what are your thoughts before I try to grab the wheel?

Stephen Janis:  I want to say emphatically that you’re being fooled in the worst possible way, all of us. And we’re literally being pushed towards our own demise by this. You want to talk about a real conspiracy, not QAnon or something, let’s talk about the reason that we don’t think that we could embrace this renewable future. And it’s for the working class. It’s for people like us that can barely afford to pay our bills. We’ll suddenly be saving thousands of dollars a year. It’s just an amazing construct that they’ve done on the psychology of it to make it think that we’re antiprogress, in America of all things. We’re antiprogress. We’re anti-the future.

Taya Graham:  We’re supposed to be the innovators. We’re the ones who have had the best science. Didn’t we get to the moon first?

Stephen Janis:  [Crosstalk]

Taya Graham:  We have scientists, innovation. I mean, in some ways we’ve been the envy of the world and we’ve attracted some of the most powerful scientists and intellectuals from around the globe to our country because we’re known for our innovation. This is really —

Stephen Janis:  We embrace stuff like AI, which, God knows where that’s going to go, and other things. But this is pretty simple. This is pretty simple. Something that could actually affect people’s lives directly. We spend $2,500 a year on gas, $3,000 to $4,000 a year on utilities. And here’s one of the leading, most respected people in this field saying, you know what? You’re not going to pay almost anything by the time it’s all installed. And yet we believe it’s impossible. And it’s really strange for me. But I’m glad we had him on to actually clarify that and maybe push through the noise a little bit.

Taya Graham:  Yeah, me too. Me too. I just wanted to add just a few closing thoughts about our discussion and why it’s important. And I think this conversation literally could not be more important, if only because the implications of being wrong are literally an existential crisis, and the consequences of being right could be liberating.

So to start this rant off, I want to begin with something that seems perhaps unrelated, but is a big part of the consequences for our environment and the people like us that will have to live with it. And hopefully in doing so, I’ll be able to unpack some of the consequences of how these carbon billionaires don’t just hurt our wallets, but actually put our lives in harm’s way. I want to talk about fire trucks.

Stephen Janis:  Fire trucks?

Taya Graham:  Yes. OK. I know that sounds crazy, but these massive red engines, they scream towards a fire to save lives. Isn’t this image iconic? Who hasn’t watched in awe as a ladder truck careens down a city street to subdue the flames of a possibly deadly blaze? But now, thanks to our ever increasingly extractive economy, they’re also a symbol of how extreme economic inequality affects our lives in unseen ways. And let me try to explain how.

Now, we all remember the horrific fires in Los Angeles several weeks ago. The historic blazes took out thousands of homes, leaving people’s lives in ruin and billions of dollars in damage. But the catastrophe was not immune from politics. President Trump accused California of holding back water from other parts of the state, which was untrue. And Los Angeles officials were also blasted for not being prepared, which is a more complicated conversation.

However, one aspect of fire that got less attention was the fire trucks. That is, until The New York Times wrote this article that is not only shocking, but actually shows how deep extractive capitalism has wreaked havoc on our lives.

So this story recounts how additional firefighters who were called in to help with the blaze were sidelined because of lack of fire trucks. So the story notes that the inability to mobilize was due to the sorry state of the fleet, which was aging, in disrepair, and new replacements had not been ordered, and the ones that had been ordered had yet to be delivered.

So this, of course, all begs the question why? Why is the mighty US economy not able to deliver lifesaving equipment in a timely manner? Well, the failure is, in part, thanks to private equity, the Wall Street firms who buy out healthy companies and then raid their coffers to enrich themselves. Well, during the aughts, a private equity firm named American Industrial Partners started buying up small fire truck manufacturers. They argued that the consolidation would lead to more efficiency — And, of course, higher profits. But those efficiencies never materialized. And as a result, deliveries of fire trucks slowed down significantly, from 18 months, to now to several years.

And this slow down left fire departments across the country without vital lifesaving equipment, a deficit that Edward Kelly, who’s the general president of the International Association of Firefighters, he said it was all due to extractive capitalism run amuck. Here’s how he capitalized it.

How can anyone place profits over first responders and their lifesaving equipment? To me, this is a failure of market capitalism, and it’s indicative of what we’re seeing with our renewable energy and our country’s failure to take advantage of it. They have literally captured the market and set the terms of the debate. Set the most widely beneficial and efficient solution buried underneath an avalanche of self-serving narratives. Greedy, private equity firms, hedge fund managers, and Wall Street investment banks have not just warped how our economy works, but also how we even perceive the challenges we face. They have flooded the zone, to borrow a phrase, with nihilistic and antagonistic and divisive sentiments that the future is bleak, hope is naive, and the only worthy and just outcome is their rapid accumulation of wealth.

And so with an alternative system of clean, affordable energy that’s achievable, that promises to save us money and our environment, consider the fire truck — Or as author David Foster Wallace said, consider the lobster. Consider that we are being slowly boiled by the uber rich. They distract us with immersive social media and misinformation so they can profit from it. They distort the present to make serious problems appear unsolvable to ensure the future so their profits will grow exponentially. They persuade us not to trust each other or even ourselves. And they literally convinced us to lack empathy for our fellow workers and then profit from our communal doomerism.

And like with the example with the fire trucks, they value, above all else, profits, not people, not the world in which we all live, not the safety of firefighters or the safety of the communities and the future that we’re all responsible for. None of it matters to them and none of it ever will. It’s up to us, we the people, to determine our future. Let’s fight for it together because it really does belong to us.

Well, I have to thank my reporting partner, Stephen Janis, for joining me on this new venture of The Inequality Watch. I really appreciate it.

Stephen Janis:  I’m very happy to be here, Taya. Thank you for having me.

Taya Graham:  Well, it’s a pleasure. It. I’m hoping that in the future we’ll be able to bring on more guests and we are going to bring on people that might surprise you. So please keep watching, because we are looking for good policy and sane policy wherever we can find it. My name is Taya Graham, and thank you so much for watching The Inequality Watch.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Thank you so much for watching The Real News Network, where we lift up the voices, stories, and struggles that you care about most. And we need your help to keep doing this work. So please tap your screen now, subscribe, and donate to The Real News Network. Solidarity forever.

The oil boom in Alberta, Canada has brought Big Oil in confrontation with First Nations for decades. This year, a breakthrough struggle occurred as the Woodland Cree First Nation established a blockade to stop construction of new oil wells by Obsidian Energy. Demanding respect for their treaty rights and a more equitable deal, the struggle of the Woodland Cree united Treaty 8 First Nations and local non-Indigenous industry owners against Obsidian. Brandi Morin reports from Treaty 8 territory in this exclusive documentary from The Real News and Ricochet Media.

Pre-Production: Brandi Morin, Geordie Day, Maximillian Alvarez, Ethan Cox
Videographer: Geordie Day
Video Post-Production: Cameron Granadino

Transcript

Irina Ceric:  WoodLand Cree First Nation Chief Isaac Laboucan-Avirom is seen taking the injunction and putting it in a nearby fire pit

Brandi Morin:  Throughout the month of May. In a remote region of Northern Alberta, Canada, a standoff took place between a First Nation and an energy company. Sounds typical, right? No, this was more complicated. For starters, an oil and gas company had requested an emergency court hearing to seek the arrest of a Cree chief opposing a drilling project on Indigenous land.

Irina Ceric:  It’s over?

Grand Chief Joe Whitehead Jr.:  It’s over. There was no intent on their part to negotiate.

Brandi Morin:  I’ve covered many confrontations between resource companies and First Nations, but I could tell this one was different as soon as I set foot in Woodland Cree territory,

Chief Isaac Laboucan-Avirom:  We believe in sharing prosperity. First Nations people are very generous. I think we’re born that way. If we see somebody hungry, we feed them. If we see somebody cold, we help them. That’s just the way we’re brought up.

Brandi Morin:  This pro-industry First Nation and their blockade were supported by many local, non-Indigenous industry owners and workers. They joined the Woodland Cree in asking Obsidian Energy to hire local, mitigate environmental impacts, and share profits with the First Nation. But Obsidian’s confrontational American CEO seemed to think he could bulldoze through local opposition.

Stephen, do you have any time for a brief [crosstalk] interview.

Stephen Loukas:  [Crosstalk] Rangers in six.

Brandi Morin:  After failed attempts to negotiate with the company, the Woodland Cree First Nation erected a blockade in the form of a traditional camp in early May to halt Obsidian Energy’s access to their traditional territory near Peace River. Soon after, Obsidian was granted a civil injunction against them.

It was a conflict that threatened to have far-reaching implications for how resource companies interact with First Nations across Canada. In June, Obsidian reached an agreement with the First Nation to end their blockade.

Although the terms aren’t public, it’s clear Obsidian were forced to walk back from their earlier, more confrontational statements. Could this be the start of a new kind of resource fight, one that pits Indigenous and non-Indigenous locals against corporate investors? This is the story of how one small First Nation partnered with local industry and forced a multinational to listen to them.

Tensions escalated on May 13 when Woodland Cree leadership, including Isaac Laboucan-Avirom, stormed out of a meeting with Obsidian CEO, Stephen Loukas, who jetted in from Calgary. Loukas is American, but the company is based in Calgary. Woodland Cree members suspect he isn’t well-informed on Indigenous rights and the legal duty to consult.

Stephen Loukas:  We’re in the early innings of executing on that plan. I’m very happy with the start that we have to date. We’ve outlined production that was approximately 36,000 BOEs a day.

Brandi Morin:  Some Woodland Cree told me Loukas comes off as arrogant and disinterested in good-faith negotiations. He sure wasn’t interested when I asked for comment

Stephen Loukas:  Rangers in six.

Brandi Morin:  What the heck does that mean?

Speaker 1:  Sports reference.

Brandi Morin:  And my repeated requests for interviews with Obsidian reps have been ignored.

Speaker 2:  I need to transfer your call, but that is the number that I have for the media department… One second. And did you already left a voicemail [crosstalk] —

Brandi Morin:  Yes.

Speaker 2:  — Requesting a call back?

Brandi Morin:  Yes, I have.

This conflict’s been brewing for a while, as far back as two years ago when the Woodland Cree learned the company was planning to drill 200 more wells here. They don’t seem to care that this is unceded territory. First Nations signed treaties with the Canadian government when Canada was established. The treaties stipulated First Nations’ access to traditional territories and rights to maintain their livelihoods. Industries like Obsidian are supposed to consult with First Nation treaty holders about any developments affecting their territories, but that’s not what Obsidian is doing.

Chief Isaac Laboucan-Avirom:  Well, this, I believe, is definitely years in the making. This didn’t happen overnight. We acted overnight — Reacted overnight, but this has been definitely an accumulation of many different circumstances.

The campus here is due to an awkward relationship, manipulation, lack of integrity. This company is basically saying, Hey, we don’t gotta work with the locals. But I’m saying, hey, you should work with the locals. Obviously you don’t have to, but you should. It’s the right thing to do. In this Peace area, it hasn’t been as economically hot as other regions in this province.

Brandi Morin:  Obsidian has filed an application that has yet to be heard by the court, an emergency application to specifically have Chief Isaac Laboucan-Avirom arrested and jailed until the blockade is taken down, and that’s a pretty bold move.

Irina Ceric:  The injunction was not surprising. Research that I participated in the Yellowhead Institute published a couple of years ago makes it very clear that resource extraction companies such as Obsidian have a very strong record of success in obtaining injunctions against First Nations and Indigenous groups, even on traditional territories, even on treaty territories, and this is Treaty 8 territory.

Brandi Morin:  I reached out to Irina Ceric, an expert on injunctions granted against activists and Indigenous groups.

Irina Ceric:  The way that the courts issue injunctions mean that issues such as Indigenous legal orders or the existence of Aboriginal or treaty rights under a treaty or under the Constitution are just not taken into consideration. When these sorts of court orders are obtained by corporations, the corporations can just say, we have this licensed project, regardless of how well that licensing process was carried out, this group of people is impeding our ability to carry out this project and we’re going to be irreparably harmed, meaning that we’re going to lose so much money and time that that cannot be addressed later on. And then the courts tend to take those arguments very seriously, and injunctions of this sort of situation are not unusual at all.

What is really unusual, and you mentioned this yourself, is this attempt by Obsidian to go back to court and attempt to have a second procedure issue, this arrest warrant. And that’s unnecessary on a legal level. Once a court order is issued, there will be an enforcement order within that injunction that says, in this case it’s the RCMP, you can enforce this order; that includes taking people into custody if necessary. So the police have that power. It’s not like the police can’t arrest the chief if they choose to. So what I’m seeing here is an attempt to sidestep the discretion of the police and attempt to have a court issue an unnecessary, and, I think, highly unusual, arrest warrant.

Chief Isaac Laboucan-Avirom:  Obviously, that’s outrageous. I think the courts also understand the repercussions that that would have and the precedents that would have, and I don’t think that is a responsible way forward, a respectful way forward. And that’s been the issue all along. I think to move forward, whether it’s with industry, government, even family, you have to have integrity, understanding, respect in response. You know what I mean? There’s principles, and even corporate principles, that have to be met. We’re not just all about the money, but we are, in a way, saying, hey, if you do want to make money, we want to make money for our people as well.

Brandi Morin:  At the heart of this conflict, industry and government circumventing treaty rights, and First Nations have had enough.

Chief Isaac Laboucan-Avirom:  I definitely don’t think there’s a good understanding of traditional rights, treaty rights, land acknowledgement, et cetera. It’s been very intrusive what Obsidian is doing to us, but it’s also showcasing to the world there has to be better ways to get work done, so to speak. I do understand that there is a need for resources to be in the global market. I think it actually might make the world a better place. I think Canada needs to do a better job at getting investors into this country — But working with the First Nations in partnership to get that done. We take responsibility for our destiny. We have our own rights to our own self-determination, and that is definitely different than what others might assume for us.

Janice Makokis:  When our ancestors and the people in Treaty 8 entered into treaty more than a hundred years ago, there was an understanding that the parties were both sovereign entities with unextinguished title to the lands. When they entered into that international treaty agreement, it was two sovereigns. And the Indigenous side of that party understood that they were not giving up anything, including the land and resources of the lands that they would’ve referred to as their territory.

Brandi Morin:  I reached out to Janice Makokis, an Indigenous scholar and member of Saddle Lake Cree Nation in Alberta, to understand more about how treaty rights play into this.

Janice Makokis:  And so what happened after that was almost immediately after treaty making happened, the Indian Act was set in play by the federal government, which corral our people onto these small parcels of land referred to now as reserves, but we would be able to have full access to land outside of the reserves for hunting, fishing, trapping, and other things to maintain our livelihood and way of life. And so that territory is inclusive of everything within the treaty territory, so everything within Treaty 8, as the Woodland Cree are under.

So there’s a significant misunderstanding between our people’s understanding of the treaty and the crown, government’s, and industry’s understanding of what that is. And I think that’s where we see these conflicts happening on the land, because we are still exercising our inherent and treaty rights as we understood them when our ancestors made that treaty. And the crown and industry have a completely different understanding, and so that’s why we have these conflicts that exist on the land.

Brandi Morin:  Don’t you think that those different understandings that the government and industry have is pretty convenient for them?

Janice Makokis:  Oh yeah, absolutely. Because it benefits them to continue to oppress and use colonial laws and legal instruments such as injunctions or through the courts to advance their interests in the name of the public good or the good of the company and for economic development reasons, whatever that is, or whatever arguments that they’re making to advance the interest of their company.

Brandi Morin:  But they don’t look at the public interest in regards to the interests of First Nations, whose sovereign territory that is and whose livelihoods are connected to that.

Janice Makokis:  That’s right, exactly. They don’t consider First Nations as a part of the interest when they’re considering the interests, whose rights, lives, and land that they’re impacting when they’re out there doing what they’re doing on the land to make profit from resource extraction taking place.

Brandi Morin:  The Peace oil sands is referred to as the mini Fort McMurray of Alberta. Fort McMurray is the extractive economic engine of Canada, pumping out billions of dollars in annual revenue. The Peace oil sands are also rich in untapped oil reserves. There’s a ton of money to be gleaned out of here, but development goes hand in hand with the destruction of the land.

Frank Whitehead:  And I said, hey, this is the most environmental person you’ll ever see. Because I was born in [inaudible]. I knew where everything is, where the moose licks are, things like that. A lot of times they bury all that when they’re working on oil. They don’t look at what we look at. We look at the whole territory. We look at where you need to put your lease. We have to be doing that, not you guys. A lot of times they don’t let us do that, and they go ahead and do it without consulting us. Consulting us is the very thing that they should be doing. They should not do that, but a lot of times they’ll just do it. Go ahead and do everything.

But my heart cries for Mother Nature a lot of times too, because Mother Nature is the one that gives us this land, that gives us everything that we should respect. We should have no garbage. We should have everything to be cleaned up after. And sometimes if you go, they’re not cleaned up. When they plug a hole and the water comes out with cement. Cement just shoots out, now you have cement all over. That’s not the way it’s supposed to be. You have to clean this place. Because to me, sometimes Mother Nature cries so much. They drain so much.

But that’s what I was taught. A lot of times you have to listen to that. You have to listen to the birds, you listen to the animals. You listen to the little creatures. You listen to the little bugs. Because the bugs, if it wasn’t for the bugs, the birds wouldn’t be here.

Brandi Morin:  So Frank, have you been coming and has you and your family been utilizing these specific areas ever since you were [crosstalk].

Frank Whitehead:  Yes. Yes.

Brandi Morin:  And so have you seen big changes?

Frank Whitehead:  Oh, man. Like I said, I’ve been here, and we flew this 10 years ago when my brother Joe was the chief there. We flew it and then we see the changes from the helicopter, how it changed. We used to hunt all the routes to walk, instead of now you can just drive anywhere. But what keeps us from that is they’re putting the gates now. This is our hunting grounds, and you put a gate and you put all this. This is where we live.

But I even see animals going away too, because [they’re] scared of everything that’s happening, and you got your trucks all over the place, and we have to watch it.

Brandi Morin:  Industrial activity is transforming the landscape, but there’s another big problem: earthquakes. The Alberta energy regulator found Obsidian Energy responsible for causing a series of quakes here in 2022 after it injected industrial wastewater deep into the ground.

Reporter 1:  Late November, an earthquake shook houses and had people stop in their tracks.

Speaker 3:  [Clip of man playing piano when earthquake starts] Oh my.

Reporter 1:  It happened in the Peace River region and could be felt more than 600 kilometers away.

Ryan Shultz:  But what makes this different or noteworthy is how big this earthquake was.

Reporter 1:  The 5.6 magnitude earthquake is the largest the province has seen. At first, it was thought to be natural, but a study done by Stanford University is suggesting wastewater disposal from oil production triggered it.

Ryan Shultz:  We are confident that this event was a manmade or induced earthquake is what they’re called.

Reporter 1:  This research shows the first link between such a large earthquake and human activities this far away from a mountain range. Researchers say they’ve seen other quakes caused by fracking, but they believe this one is different: it happened after wastewater was injected into a well to extract oil.

Ryan Shultz:  The injection of CO2 also has the potential to cause earthquakes. So this is something to, essentially, start thinking about, and maybe even start monitoring.

Brandi Morin:  One of the quakes was the largest ever recorded in Alberta’s history: it scored a local magnitude of 5.6 — Yet, Obsidian denies it had anything to do with them and is appealing the AER ruling.

Chief Isaac Laboucan-Avirom:  We did make a request for incremental data that really anchored the AER’s decision as well as the characterization that the seismic activity in the Peace River area was solely attributable to Obsidian’s operations. We didn’t agree with that assertion then, we don’t agree with it now. We are in the process of evaluating that data. We will have more to say in that regard in the future.

Brandi Morin:  The memory of this earthquake is seared into the minds of all here, including Chief Isaac.

Can you talk about the earthquakes?

Chief Isaac Laboucan-Avirom:  Oh my goodness. I remember that day I had elders calling me. I just dropped my kids off for school. My daughters were calling me from Peace River. I was taking off to a meeting. I believe I was close to the area, ready to turn around. But definitely unexpected and felt by everybody, not just me and my family, but the farmers nearby, industry. I believe it might’ve been one of the biggest in Alberta to date.

Brandi Morin:  So do you feel it, or…?

Chief Isaac Laboucan-Avirom:  We felt it. It was shaking houses, absolutely. I think there were four or five tremors or something that happened. Like I said, I was on the road and I was definitely scared for my children. Obviously, when you hear about earthquakes, because they’re not normal in our area, we wonder what the repercussions would be. Will it rupture pipes? Will it rupture foundational stuff? Will it hurt old homes? We don’t know. Will it contaminate groundwaters?

Brandi Morin:  Will there be more?

Chief Isaac Laboucan-Avirom:  Will there be more? That’s one of the biggest questions as well. Will there be more? Are they man-made? Are they industry made?

Brandi Morin:  Chief Isaac, like most Woodland Cree, grew up hunting, fishing, and trapping. He still gets out on the land as often as he can.

Chief Isaac Laboucan-Avirom:  So then my brother comes looking in for me three or four nights after, tries pulling me out, he gets stuck. Then he had to walk out with my little brother to the end of the road. And that must have been… Yeah, it was definitely a few miles.

Brandi Morin:  So then how’d you guys get out then?

Chief Isaac Laboucan-Avirom:  Three or four four-by-fours.

Brandi Morin:  [Laughs] Chains?

Chief Isaac Laboucan-Avirom:  And everything. Yeah.

Brandi Morin:  Just moments after sharing stories of being on the land with me, the chief discovered access to his beloved hunting territory was blocked. Obsidian erected a gate to another industry road not far from the Woodland Cree blockade.

Oh, they have a gate up.

Chief Isaac Laboucan-Avirom:  Holy fuck.

Brandi Morin:  Notice… Oh, was that there before?

Chief Isaac Laboucan-Avirom:  No.

Brandi Morin:  This road is closed… Blah, blah, blah. Oh, here’s the security lady. I wonder what she’s going to say to you.

Chief Isaac Laboucan-Avirom:  When was the gate put up?

Security Guard:  Yesterday.

Chief Isaac Laboucan-Avirom:  Oh, so they did put it up, hey? I’m the chief. Just wondering what’s going on with this gate. Don’t worry. I’m not going to make a big deal. I just wanted to see if the gate was put up.

Security Guard:  [Inaudible].

Chief Isaac Laboucan-Avirom:  Oh wow.

Security Guard:  I just don’t like being on video.

Chief Isaac Laboucan-Avirom:  Yeah, neither do I [laughs]. Man. Well, this is very, very unfortunate. How many people are up this way?

Security Guard:  I have no idea.

Chief Isaac Laboucan-Avirom:  Son of a gun. All right. Yep.

Security Guard:  Well, I’m not letting no one unless they work for… [Inaudible].

Chief Isaac Laboucan-Avirom:  Which company? Obsidian?

Security Guard:  [Nods][inaudible].

Chief Isaac Laboucan-Avirom:  Yeah. All right. Is there any other construction going on over there? Just tankers.

Security Guard:  [Shakes head][inaudible].

Chief Isaac Laboucan-Avirom:  Alright, well, I’ll go let them know that they did put up the gate. I thought they were going to wait for us.

Like, holy fuck. The direct attack on treaty from stopping the people who live off of this land from entering their own lands. How it stops us from hunting, gathering, trapping. We were just talking about stories of how we used to just camp forever. And then now we’re being locked out of our traditional territories and places where we found medicine. We were finding medicine over there. They harvested moose over there. We have that and they’ve put a lock on it. Something has to change.

Brandi Morin:  Back at the blockade, Woodland Cree members are set up along the Walrus industry access road, about 40 minutes east of Peace River. It’s a key access road utilized by Obsidian, which is now shut down. The company is losing around $450,000 Canadian dollars a day here.

And the Woodland Cree are not alone. See, I’ve covered a lot of Indigenous defense frontlines. Other than a few non-Native allies that show up sometimes, I’ve never witnessed non-Indigenous industry owners supporting First Nations like they are here. Some have parked their semi-trucks and heavy equipment at the blockade, despite risking being blacklisted by Obsidian.

Dustin Lambert:  My name’s Dustin Lambert. I’m from Peace River, Alberta, area.

Brandi Morin:  And what do you do?

Dustin Lambert:  I work in construction.

Brandi Morin:  Awesome. What do you think about what’s going on here with the camp?

Dustin Lambert:  I think it’s a good thing for the community to stand against the oil companies when they try to take from the communities and not work with the community. People like Obsidian has work, but they want to bring in a large outside contractor. And, as I understand, in Canada, we’re free to work in all areas. However, when you have local contractors, they should have the first opportunity. And when Obsidian goes and tries to bring the larger contractors in that have the potential to take all the work from the companies in the region.

And then with Obsidian trying to go through and not work with the community being like the Woodland Band, or Lubicon, or any of the bands, because we work through them and directly with them. And I’ve worked with these guys on and off pretty much my whole life. Went to school with them and then worked with them.

Brandi Morin:  Meanwhile, Woodland Cree members are well equipped for the long haul if need be.

Frank Whitehead:  Right here.

Brandi Morin:  Blended right in.

Frank Whitehead:  Right here. The snare’s right here.

Brandi Morin:  Wow.

Frank Whitehead:  And that’s how you put it.

And this is where they’re working. And look at what’s happening. They’re taking all our rabbits, everything, animals.

Brandi Morin:  The Woodland Cree have utilized these lands for millennia, but they were forced out of their traditional territories decades ago when oil was discovered here. The band was made to settle on allotted reserve sites about an hour away from here. But they’ve never abandoned their original homelands.

Frank Whitehead:  Well, it’s very important because of our livelihood, our hunting grounds, what’s happening with the fires too, and that’s not helping us. But with the oil companies too now coming in, that’s not helping us no more. It’s just destroying our livelihood right now.

Brandi Morin:  Frank’s been an elected Woodland Cree Nation counselor for over 16 years. He’s seen industry come and go, governments make promises and break them. Foreign companies are even more of a problem, he says.

Frank Whitehead:  I don’t think they know what we do here as First Nations people, especially when somebody else is not from this country. That’s not right because they don’t know. And we try talking to ’em, we tried teaching them, we tried everything. But still, a lot of people won’t understand how we live here. And they need to understand this. We’re from here. We were here, one of the first people that lived in this territory a long time ago. We went up and down these rivers. Every year we canoed down Peace River. So they don’t know what’s going on and they need to know, they need to listen to us too.

But people, you gotta understand that this is our livelihood. This is how we were born. This is how we were raised. This is what we eat. Everything we eat and the herbs and everything that the trees provide for us, the animals. If the animals are going, sometimes when we trap, we don’t… It’s my kids, their livelihood, and it’s gotta continue like this for generations and generations. We cannot stop this. This is how we were born. We have young guys that’s doing that now. This is the young guy that’s trapping, hunting, and he learned.

Brandi Morin:  Woodland Cree Counselor Joe Whitehead Jr. has been helping oversee the camp. Grand chief of the Kee Tas Kee Now Tribal Council and chief of the Woodland Cree, he’s pissed that Obsidian is sidestepping its duty to consult and work with the nation.

Grand Chief Joe Whitehead Jr.:  The trust factor for our First Nation is really low with industry because of Obsidian. Obsidian is to blame for everything that’s happening today, where the cops are staging over there to come in here and trying to remove people that are from the land and believe in the land. And we are teaching kids here today, and we’ll still keep doing that.

And we will be here forever. Obsidian might not be here for a long time, until they take the resources away from our land. We’re just asking for that fair, equal share of the resources that go out of here. No more of this construction and all that. We want to be part of the solution and part of the development. That’s all we’re saying. And I encourage First Nations people to stand up because this is our fight together. It’s just not Woodland Crees, it’s us all across this Turtle Island, all of Canada.

We always say we support each other, but let’s have action, any means necessary in terms of trying to educate Canada in terms of who First Nations people are and who we really are, and that’s from the land. And we have to protect it. Any means necessary.

There was a gate put up over here. In our treaty, it states that all gates shall be open in case of hunger. But what they did was they put up a gate and blocked our chief. And that’s wrong. And I’m mad today because of that. This is going to escalate if the government doesn’t step in.

And if Obsidian doesn’t come to the table, what does that say to other industries? They can start putting up gates where we hunt, trap, fish, and gather? That’s our treaty right. That’s nobody else’s right but our First Nations people.

Grand Chief Arthur Noskey:  We’re still in that role as the liaison team.

Speaker 4:  We’re speaking with you, we speak with the other side, for sure. We’re not picking a side. That’s why we need to be able to keep those lines of communication open. If you’re saying —

Grand Chief Joe Whitehead Jr.:  The people be here, they’re not welcome in our company. We can stay over there, take your photos and whatnot. So speak with the chief when he gets here.

Speaker 4:  Oh no, that’s OK. And like I said, we’re not here to pick sides. We’ve always been upfront with you in regards to that.

Grand Chief Joe Whitehead Jr.:  Well, all First Nations that have a stake in this, it’s just not Woodland Cree, it’s everybody. We live off this land. And I think industry and government need to be educated more in terms of when they come in and try to develop the resources around us. We will idle no more. We will do what we have to do as a nation to protect the rights, the treaty rights of our people that were signed in 1899.

And I believe that industry needs to wake up in terms of what they’re doing. You need to come to the table and not give us lies and lies after lies. You need to be honest.

Police Officer 1:  …Energy regulator’s going to want to inspect because it’s not been operational. So they might be here tomorrow too.

Grand Chief Joe Whitehead Jr.:  We’ll see, we’ll see about that.

Police Officer 1:  The energy regulator?

Grand Chief Joe Whitehead Jr.:  That’s unprecedented because [inaudible].

Brandi Morin:  You guys know if that helicopter that’s been circling, if that’s the industry guys?

Speaker 4:  Yeah.

Brandi Morin:  It is, eh? So they’re just trying to scope things out?

Speaker 4:  They gotta do their checks. Extra police that are going to be in the area just to ensure the safety and security of all involved.

Speaker 1:  So they’re not there to enforce the injunction?

Brandi Morin:  It’s a step up, obvious.

Speaker 4:  Well, we don’t have any information in regards to what’s going to happen in regards to the injunction. We’re [crosstalk] not privy to that information.

Brandi Morin:  — Resources for nothing.

Speaker 4:  We do have extra resources there.

Speaker 5:  But to ensure the safety of all people involved, that’s pretty much the one group. So the only other group was the police officers.

Speaker 4:  Well, we have to be prepared for anything that might happen. So if we didn’t have those police here and something were to happen, then it would be [crosstalk] how are you able to respond?

Speaker 5:  I’m not sure what would happen between them?

Speaker 4:  That’s what we don’t know either, right?

Speaker 5:  Exactly.

Speaker 4:  We never know. We’ve been to lots of these type of events. There’s people who decide that they want to hijack these type of events that people don’t necessarily think the way that everybody here or that you may think. As a result…

Brandi Morin:  Hello!

Police Officer 2:  Hi, how’s it going?

Brandi Morin:  Good, how are you?

Police Officer 2:  Living the dream. [Crosstalk] One day at a time.

Brandi Morin:  You guys are hiding out back here?

Police Officer 2:  You guys are not allowed in here, I’m sorry.

Brandi Morin:  You’re hiding out back here?

Police Officer 2:  No, we’re just here for fun.

Brandi Morin:  Is this C-IRG?

Police Officer 2:  Sorry?

Brandi Morin:  Is this C-IRG? Are you guys C-IRG?

Police Officer 2:  What’s that? Sorry, I don’t know —

Brandi Morin:  Community-Industry Response Group.

Police Officer 2:  No, no, no, no, no.

Brandi Morin:  OK. So obviously —

Police Officer 2:  I’m sorry, I don’t know all the acronyms [laughs].

Brandi Morin:  OK, so you’re staging, obviously, [crosstalk] because you’re hiding.

Police Officer 2:  Well, we tend to stay on the road, right. We need a place to park our vehicles. But you guys are technically not allowed in here because it’s closed.

Brandi Morin:  It’s closed.

Police Officer 2:  This place is closed

Brandi Morin:  By the police, or…?

Police Officer 2:  No, no, no, it’s just closed.

Brandi Morin:  Can you say what you’re doing?

Police Officer 2:  We’re just here working. That’s all we’re doing. There’s nothing to be worried about. If you have any questions, you guys were in touch with the DLTs?

Brandi Morin:  Yeah. OK.

Police Officer 2:  OK? You guys just can’t stay here.

Brandi Morin:  OK.

Police Officer 2:  OK? Alright. Thanks a lot, guys.

Irina Ceric:  There’s another way to address this, which is to look more at the politics and history of these sorts of struggles. This is not the only example of courts refusing to recognize Indigenous jurisdiction. This is not the only example of Canadian law facilitating the extraction of resources at the cost of the environment, the cost of workers, at the cost of, in this case, First Nations. So to me, this is not an unusual outcome of the foundation of Canadian law in both settler-colonialism and in the Canadian foundation in resource extraction as a national preoccupation.

Brandi Morin:  Well, you think that because it’s 2024, because we’ve had the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, because we’re in so-called building nation-to-nation relationships, you think that things would be different by now.

Irina Ceric:  You would. You absolutely would.

Chief Isaac Laboucan-Avirom:  Well, we want to see, obviously, respectful, responsible industry. Obviously we’re not getting respect here, and they’re not being responsible. Just what you asked me about them not hiring local, other people around us. We want to see stuff be sustainable. We do care about our environment. We do care about the lands, the waters. We do feel the encroachment of industry and the accumulative effects of not just industry, but also the environment. The wildfires. The droughts. We’re thankful for this rain. But it’s about finding that balance. We are educating our children now to become the operators, tradespeople, nurses, teachers, et cetera. We want to educate our peoples to adapt to modern society — But as well keep their traditional way of life.

Grand Chief Arthur Noskey:  It’s kind of absurd for Obsidian to start making those recommendations to the province and even to the courts, and even to try and enforce the RCMP to do something, as those that don’t know the treaty. The RCMP officers were presented at the treaty, a day of making treaty, and these were here for our protection against foreigners that would intrude in our way of life. Obsidian, you’re intruding without talking to the people, without doing a proper process because the government, you’re listening to the government more so than the leadership that is sitting at this table.

And I will say when it comes to jailing our people, our chiefs, I think you’ll see a lot of chiefs either in jail, and hopefully that the court systems or that the institutions can hold all of the Canadian First Nations people in jail. Because I think there is an uprising in the making, and I think at some point we need to start making those calls for that support.

Brandi Morin:  Just days after the failed May 13 meeting with Obsidian representatives, the chiefs of Treaty 8 traveled to gather in the same meeting room to support the Woodland Cree.

Chief Isaac Laboucan-Avirom:  I just want to say that Obsidian is changing the dynamics of industry within our backyard and others. For Woodland Cree, we are hoping that they remove the injunctions on myself and my people, that they remove the injunctions of our local joint ventures and their livelihoods.

Grand Chief Arthur Noskey:  And Supreme Court of Canada ruled that there must be consultation with landowners.

Brandi Morin:  Treaty 8 Grand Chief Arthur Noskey called on the province to step in.

Grand Chief Arthur Noskey:  Remove ACO Aboriginal Consultation Office, AER, Alberta Energy Regulator, and the Red Tape Ministry, because these agencies and ministries do not honor the Supreme Court ruling, the duty to consult. Premier Danielle Smith and cabinet, we call upon you to meet with Woodland Cree First Nation leadership and Treaty 8 chiefs to establish a table for revenue sharing talks with the province. It is important that the public and industry know that Alberta government’s First Nations consultation policy is their own policy. We are sovereign nations with our own consultation processes and laws.

Brandi Morin:  For decades, First Nations in Alberta have insisted the province pay up. Alberta makes billions in royalties earned from industry projects in First Nations territories. The province has largely ignored requests to share some of those benefits with Indigenous communities. The current situation could pressure Alberta’s government to change course.

Chief Sheldon Sunshine:  When we talk about the issue that my colleague here, Chief Ivan, and their community has dealt with Obsidian, we feel those impacts all across our territory. We deal with the same issues in our backyard. We’re here to support Chief Isaac and the rest of the Treaty 8 chiefs in solidarity in opposing this issue. It affects all of our First Nation people. And when you take a look at the resource development in our backyard, the government of Alberta has received over $30 billion, and the government of Canada is prospering as well — Yet, while our communities are suffering. This attack on Woodland community is an attack on all of our treaty rights.

Chief Dwayne Lovell Laboucan:  It’s pretty simple from our end: if you’re going to come and make a livelihood in our lands, we must too. That’s our message to oil and gas. You’re not going to come in here and start bullying us. We’re here to stay and we’re ready to fight. Hay-hay.

Brandi Morin:  Ultimately, this isn’t just about what’s happening in Woodland Cree territory. This is about a status quo that’s fundamentally untenable for Indigenous peoples. The status quo must change, says Chief Isaac.

Chief Isaac Laboucan-Avirom:  Well just look at the GDP that comes out of our land from the forest sector, the oil and gas sector, even, for the longest time, billions, hundreds of millions come out of this land. Why are, as First Nations, we still administrate poverty? Obviously those comments that are made on greed, it’s people that don’t even understand the current situation and the reality of this country. We shouldn’t have to fight this hard for prosperity when we signed a treaty. A treaty is a nation-to-nation relationship.

And that people ask about our greed? Well, I think it’s actually the other way around. People don’t want to see us lift ourselves up. I’m not looking for a handout. I’m looking to just provide and to protect my people with our own ways and our own rights. We want to be part of the workforce. We want to develop megaprojects. We want to be owners of the resources.

And you’re darn right it is about money. My people shouldn’t be living in poverty. We deserve equalization payments. The chiefs that are around this table are the economic engine of this country, the economic engine of this country. Our resources supply the world with some of our trees, our oil and gas. And we could set a good example, a world-class example of doing things right. And we need that opportunity to do things right and that collaboration with industry, government, and communities — And in solidarity with our chiefs, our brothers and our sisters.

And I really want to commend them, the councilmen, the leadership, the elders, the youth. Our kids need a brighter future. Seven out of 10 of us are going to die sooner than the [rest of] Canada’s population. Seven out of 10 of our kids are in CFS issues. That’s because of poverty. So how is this greed? It’s actually the other way around, where a greedy American company wants to come dictate in our land? I don’t think so.

Grand Chief Arthur Noskey:  You’re talking about landowners that entered into a treaty with the imperial crown. How can there be anything higher than that in our lands? Where is that certificate of ownership, Canada? Where’s the certificate of ownership, province? So these are questions that still remain there. Right now they’re just brokering deals with industry at the expense of our lands, our resources, and just leaving their contaminants behind. They’re greedy for money, and it is obvious. Thank you very much.

Grand Chief Joe Whitehead Jr.:  I just want to make a quick comment in terms of why we’re here today in terms of what we’re doing. And it’s for our people. And I’d like to show you, this is what my daughter does every time I go home. I see her every four hours, and she takes this shirt and covers herself up. And the people need to know that we are fighting for our kids and their kids, for the future, so they don’t keep fighting. That’s one thing that people don’t understand. That we are passionate people. We are humble people, and we like to laugh, but at the same time, we have to protect this land, our treaty rights, for our future generation.

Brandi Morin:  Now you also said that if they were to come to arrest you, that you wouldn’t surrender.

Chief Isaac Laboucan-Avirom:  Surrender. Of course not. I don’t think there’s a Cree word for surrender [laughs] or cede. No. I’m here to maintain the best interest of my community. And if I was, I know there’s a lot of support that I have out there. I think Evander Kane said it best: Sometimes you got to fuck around to find out [laughs].

Brandi Morin:  I’m Brandi Morin, reporting in the traditional territories of the Woodland Cree Nation for The Real News Network, IndigiNews, and Ricochet Media.

The shaky ceasefire in Gaza is entering the final days of its first phase, but the genocide of the Palestinian people has not been paused. On Feb. 25, Israeli tanks stormed Jenin, the heart of the Palestinian resistance in the West Bank, for the first time since the Second Intifada. From Donald Trump’s declarations that the US should “own” Gaza to promises to deport pro-Palestine student activists, the new administration’s intentions to accelerate the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and criminalize solidarity with Palestinians have been made clear. Abby Martin, independent journalist and host of Empire Files, joins The Real News to help analyze how war on Palestine is expanding and evolving.

Studio Production: David Hebden, Adam Coley

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Welcome to the Real News Network and welcome back to our weekly live stream Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. Fear that Israel is preparing to unleash the same people destroying population, displacing civilization, erasing force that it unleashed on Gaza for 15 months, beginning just days after Israel and Hamas began Phase one of last month’s fragile ceasefire in Gaza, the Israeli military has sent troops, bulldozers, drones, helicopters, and heavy battle tanks into the Northern West Bank, United Nations. Secretary General Antonio Gutierrez said on Monday that he was gravely concerned by the rising violence in the occupied West Bank by Israeli settlers and other violations. Palestinian writer and journalist, Miriam Bardi told democracy now this week that what we are seeing in fact is a green light of annexation. What is happening right now, she said in the West Bank is defacto annexation of lands. This Israeli offensive, the so-called Operation Iron Wall, is one of the most intense military operations in the West Bank since the height of the second Infa Palestinian uprising against Israel’s occupation.

Just over two decades ago, Israel’s defense minister Israel Kaz, said this week that 40,000 Palestinians have been forced out of the refugee camps in Janine Tu and Hams. All activity by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency in those areas has also been stopped. Now, Katz made it clear that this is not a short-term operation. In a written statement, Katz said, I instructed the IDF to prepare for a long stay in the camps that were cleared for the coming year, and to not allow residents to return and the terror to return and grow, we will not return to the reality that was in the past. He said, we will continue to clear refugee camps and other terror centers to dismantle the battalions and terror infrastructure of extreme Islam that was built, armed, funded, and supported by the Iranian evil axis he claimed in an attempt to establish an Eastern terror front. Now, I want you to keep those statements from Israel’s defense minister in your head as you watch this next clip. This is actually from an incredible documentary report that we filmed in the now empty Janine Refugee Camp in July of 20 23, 3 months before October 7th. The report was shot produced by shot and produced by Ross Domini, Nadia Per Do and Ahad Elbaz. Take a look.

Nadia Péridot:

The Real News Network spoke to Haniya Salameh whose son Farouk was killed by the Israeli army just days before he was due to be married.

Speaker 3:

Far

Nadia Péridot:

Like many of Janine’s residents is a refugee of the 1948 Zionist expulsion of people from across Palestine. Today, these depopulated villages either remain empty or have been raised to the ground to make way for Israel’s settlements. Palestinians are banned from returning to these

Speaker 3:

Homes

Maximillian Alvarez:

With these tanks and bulldozers rolling through the occupied West Bank right now with Israel launching new attacks in southern Syria this week with the ceasefire in Gaza, still very much in danger of collapsing before phase one of the deal is set to end on Saturday and with Donald Trump still joking that it would be best if the US took over Gaza. The bubble has officially burst on any pre inauguration hopes that people had that Trump’s presidency would somehow usher in peace in the Middle East and an end to the humanitarian horror of Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from what remains of occupied historic Palestine and the United States’ support for it. Quite the opposite in fact. And not only that, but here in the so-called West the United States, Canada, Europe, we’re seeing a corresponding surge in state and institutional repression of free speech, the free press and the independent and corporate media sides speaking the truth about Israel’s genocide of Palestinians and our government’s complicity in it.

We are also seeing a surge in the criminalization of Palestine solidarity protests and attempts to classify solidarity with Palestine as support for terrorism. So listen, we need to get real about where we are right now, what we are facing, and how we can keep forging forward, fighting for what’s right and good and beautiful in times of great darkness and great danger, like the time we’re in now, fighting for peace in a world of war, fighting for life in a culture of mass death. And that is why I could not be more grateful that we’ve got the great Abby Martin on the live stream today to help us do just that. You all should know Abby by now, but in case you don’t for some reason and you’ve been living under a rock, Abby Martin is an independent journalist and host of the Empire Files, an interview and documentary series that everyone needs to watch and support.

She’s the director of the 2019 documentary, Gaza Fights for Freedom and is also directing a new documentary called Earth’s Greatest Enemy, which examines how the United States Empire is not only a primary contributor to climate change, but the central entity that imperils life on earth. Abby, thank you so much for joining us again. It’s always so great to have you back on the Real News. I want to start with the latest horrifying developments in Israel’s war on Palestine. Can you walk us through what we’re seeing and perhaps what we’re not seeing in the West Bank right now?

Abby Martin:

I mean, I think your intro did a really great job at laying out the current situation Max, and thank you for the intro. To me, that was wonderful. Look, it’s very clear that whatever ceasefire deal was negotiated, that the annexation and the green lighting of the further annexation of the West Bank was part of the sweetheart edition to that ceasefire deal. And that’s exactly what we’ve seen, just completely transition from Gaza to the West Bank where extremist settlers in tandem with Israeli soldiers are clearing out entire refugee camps and villages and at an expulsion rate that we have never frankly seen before. I mean, 40,000 Palestinians being expelled just over 35 days is just extraordinary. And this is happening almost on a daily basis. We’re at the barrel of a gun. Dozens of Palestinians are being forced and rejected from their homes. We’ve seen 60 Palestinians be killed in this timeframe.

Several children, just over the last week, we saw two Palestinian children being gunned down. This just is happening at such a rapid pace. It’s very dizzying, and it just seems like there are no measures in place whatsoever to stop this rapid annexation and this whole operation Iron Wall. It’s very clear that the ultimate goal is to clear out as much as possible and just have the plausible deniability, oh, it’s settlers. Oh, it’s Hamas fighters. Oh, well, we have to do it because of the violence that’s happening. I mean, again, if you don’t get to the root of the violence, it’s just going to erupt. It’s a tinderbox and it’s a pressure cooker. So all of the things that are happening as a result of the clearing out of these villages and refugee camps, it’s an inevitability. So you’re going to see waves of attacks, whether they be knife attacks or suicide bombings or like the inert bombs that didn’t explode and actually kill people on those buses. I mean, all of these things are inevitabilities. Once you engage on a full scale invasion and war to the native population, that’s already under a very extremely repressive police state dictatorship that prevents them from doing anything at all.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Could you say just a little more on that last point you filmed there in the West Bank, you’ve been there, you’ve reported on it many, many times. I guess for folks who maybe haven’t looked into the West Bank as much as they’ve learned about Gaza over the past two years, could you just say a little more for folks who are watching this about the state of life as such in the West Bank before this operation Iron Wall began?

Abby Martin:

Yeah, and a perfect example of that is this current ceasefire deal, phase one where people may be asking themselves how is it possible that hundreds of Palestinian prisoners really their hostages in their own right? How is it possible that there’s so many hundreds of Palestinians being held and being released at the behest of Hamas’ demands? It may be confusing to some to see just a couple dozen hostages from the Israeli side being released for hundreds of Palestinians. Well, the answer is basically the fact that there’s this repressive police state style dictatorship that wantonly just arrests hundreds of people, detains them, arbitrarily, keeps them without charges or trial, and that’s precisely what we’ve seen, ramp up and escalate in the aftermath of October 7th, hundreds and hundreds of Palestinians, including dozens of children and women, not to take away the revolutionary agency or political agency of women, but it is just unbelievable how many people have been detained arbitrarily and held.

Why aren’t they called hostages? I have no idea. But it just again, just kind of paints the picture of what Palestinians are living under. They cannot raise a Palestinian flag. They cannot practice any political activity. It is crazy. I mean, they can set up arbitrary checkpoints, resort these people’s lives to a living. Hell set up just random blockades that can reroute people just take hours out of their day just to make their lives extremely uncomfortable. But it just goes far beyond that. I mean, raiding killing Palestinians arbitrarily having no recourse whatsoever. You certainly cannot have armed resistance. I mean, anything that can be construed as a weapon in these people’s homes or cars can just subject you to not only humiliating tactics, but also just being thrown in prison. I mean, we’re talking about such a crazy level of control that simply the David versus Goliath, just symbolism of throwing a rock at a tank. There’s a law on the books that can put a Palestinian child in prison for 20 years for simply throwing a rock at an armed tank. So these are the kind of measures that have been in place since 1967 when this military dictatorship was imposed illegally. And ever since then, we’ve been placated as Westerners with this promise of a two states solution, which has just been a cover for the continued annexation of the West Bank and under Trump, we’ve seen just a complete rapid green lighting of just continuing that policy.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah, man. I mean, I did not want to incorporate it as a visual element in this live stream because frankly, it’s too ghoulish and horrifying to give any more airtime to. But I would point folks, if you haven’t already seen it, to an AI generated video that our president shared on his truth social account, promoting the transformation of Gaza into a luxury beach front destination filled with skyscrapers, condos, bearded belly dancers like Monde Weiss reported the video shows Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sunbathing together in Gaza, Elon Musk eating hummus, the area being converted into resort called Trump, Gaza, a golden Trump statue and children running from rubble into picturesque beaches. What the hell, man? I mean, I guess where do you even find your center of humanity in such an inhumane timeline?

Abby Martin:

I mean, that’s what’s so creepy about it. It’s the dizzying spectacle of it all. And I feel like Trump, I feel like he was much more dialed in 2016 personally because he was less senile and whatever. He was younger and more astute. But now it does seem like he’s kind of, he doesn’t give a shit. I mean, he is just going for it and letting all of these crazy outliers just take the government for a ride. I mean, Elon Musk, this AI stuff, it’s like by the time that you’re trying to unpack this press conference where he is sitting next to this grinning genocide fugitive talking about how Gaza is a hellhole and how you’re going to get, why would you want to go back to Gaza? You’re just going to get shot and killed next to the grinning genocide fugitive, who did it. I mean, once you unpack that, he’s already signed another thousand executive orders once you try to make sense of this AI generated video of Trump’s golden head on a balloon, and kids running out of the rubble into a more attractive version of Elon Musk eating hummus and peta.

I mean, they’ve already done this, that and the other. So again, it’s the spectacle. It’s like no response is the good response. It’s so difficult to even maneuver this new political landscape even for us who follow it for a job. I mean, a perfect example is the sig. He twice the Nazi salute from Elon. I mean, it’s like, what is the appropriate response to this? Because they will just gaslight you and say what you see isn’t reality. And so by the time you’re like, no, no, no, that’s a Nazi salute. No, no, no, it’s like they’ve already done this, that and the other thing. So it’s such an insane time to be living and to navigate this political space, and I just keep comparing it to the mass hallucinations. Everyone’s relegated to their own framework of reality. The algorithm boosts whatever it is that you want to justify as that reality, and that’s kind of our respective mass hallucinations that we’re wading through. I mean, I feel like I’m living in reality, and that’s why I’m so aghast and horrified by everything. But

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah, that’s why I wake up screaming every night. And in fact, so much of our politics is a war on the means of perceiving reality. It is a war over the narrative of what we’re actually seeing. And from everyone’s watching a plane crash down the road in Washington DC and it’s immediately a battle over is this DEI or is this something else? Is the fires in my home state of California? Is this A DEI thing? Is this climate change? The war over the means of perception, I think is really the terrain upon which so many of us are fighting or forced to fight in the 21st century. And I definitely want to circle back to Trump Musk and how we navigate all of this here at home in the second half of the discussion. But I guess before we move on, I wanted to bring us back to the West Bank.

You mentioned the gaslighting, right? You mentioned the ways that that war on perception, the top down narratives handed to us by the very villains who are committing genocide and destroying our government and so on and so forth. I am not drawing an equivalence between our situation and that of the occupied Palestinian. But I think in your amazing conversation and interview with the great Muhammad el-Kurd about his new book, I was learning so many lessons from him that feel very relevant to us today, particularly the gaslighting and the sort of top down effort to turn the victim into the terrorist. I wanted to play that clip really quick from Muhammad el-Kurd. This is a clip from Abby show, the Empire Files, which she interviewed Muhammad on recently. So let’s play that clip and let’s talk about what this can tell us about how to navigate what we’re up against now.

Mohammed el-Kurd:

Yeah, and I think the average person, anybody with common sense would understand that defending yourself against intruders, against colonizers, against thiefs, against burglars, against murderous regimes is a fundamental right that you are entitled to defend yourself and your family. And actually across history, people who have done so have been hailed as heroes. But violence itself is essentially a mutating concept. It’s something to celebrate when it’s sanctioned by the empire, and it’s something to pearl clutch out when it’s done by natives, by these young men in tracksuits. But again, this is, it’s not like a fundamental western opposition to violence or militias or whatever. It’s a rejection of any kind of political prospect for the Palestinian, because anytime the Palestinian has engaged in armed resistance or has engaged in kinds of resistance that have extended beyond the bounds of what is acceptable to a liberal society, that those are some of the only times we have been heard.

So what does that say about the world and what does that say to the Palestinian? When we are told time and time again, the only time people are going to listen to us and talk about us and put us in their headlines is when we engage in violent resistance. But ultimately, this is about the rejection of Palestinian. Armed resistance is about a rejection of a Palestinian national project is about a rejection of actually ending the occupation. Everybody can sing every day about ending the occupation, but when it becomes real, we are terrified of it. We lose our compass. We refuse, we refuse to even entertain it. For years, maybe all of my life, I’ve been hearing about a two-state solution while Israeli bulldozers eat away at our land in areas that are supposedly under Palestinian authority control. It’s like a circus where they’re just telling us these narratives to buy time while they’re creating facts on the ground, while they’re setting greedy the terms of engagement and creating the roadmap for the future while robbing us of any kind of future.

And while sanctioning even our ambitions, even our intentions, even our hopes and dreams. You know what I mean? There’s also a hyper, when we say defanging of Palestinians, it’s not just taking our rifles and vilifying our freedom fighters, but there’s also an interrogation of our thoughts. They ask us, do you condemn this and do you condemn that and do you want to do this, and do you want to throw Israelis into the sea? And what’s your issue with those people? And it’s never about actually engaging with you in a certain political uplifted discourse, but it’s about making sure you concede to the liberal world order before you are even allowed entry to the conversation. And that needs to be,

Maximillian Alvarez:

Everyone should go watch that full interview first thing. Second thing, everyone should go read Muhammad el-Kurd’s book by Haymarket Books. Perfect victim. Third thing, Abby, I’ve got just some questions I want to throw at you really quick. Can you talk about that clip, what Muhammad’s saying there and how this applies to what we’re seeing in the West Bank? A lot of these refugee camps, yes, they’re where freedom fighters lived, but also a bunch of regular people who have nowhere else to go. So can you help folks apply what Muhammad’s saying there to what we’re seeing unfold in the West Bank, but also how this applies to us here? It does feel eerily reminiscent of the right wing in this country, condemning violence of Black Lives Matter protesters while celebrating Kyle Rittenhouse shooting them. Right? That double standard does seem to be very much at play here. So I wanted to ask if we could talk about it in the context of the West Bank first and then bring it back home after that.

Abby Martin:

Absolutely. I think, look, it’s really, really clear to understand that the West Bank is under illegal occupation and under international law, Palestinians as well as other people under occupying forces have the legal right to armed resistance that is enshrined in law. And so when you’re looking at a place like the West Bank that hosts houses 3 million Palestinians, and a lot of people are resisting naturally, so of course, I mean, that’s going to be an inevitability you’re going to resist if you’re denied basic human rights, denied clean water, denied mobility. I mean, when you’re living under this harsh repression where you can’t even celebrate the hostages coming home, you can’t grieve, you can’t publicly mourn. You can’t erect a flag. I mean, it’s absolutely insane what these people are subjected to on a day-to-day basis. And given the genocide that we’ve seen erupt in Gaza, the unending slaughter of children, I mean, obviously Palestinians are united front despite the political schisms and divisions.

And so you’re going to see resistance in the West Bank, especially when you see full scale mobilizations to invade and annex your land illegally. And so it’s actually a legal right to see resistance mobilized against Israeli invaders. So first and foremost, we need to zoom out and realize not only is this an egregious and flagrant violation of just the ceasefire, the idea of a ceasefire that Israel considers a ceasefire, just no one reacting to them constantly violating the ceasefire, whether it be in Lebanon or Gaza or in the West Bank. They can just go on and do whatever they want with complete impunity. And the second that a Palestinian fights back, oh, they’ve broken the ceasefire. Oh, the deal’s off the table. It is so disgustingly. But when you zoom out from that, I mean, yeah, Palestinians have the right to resist. So what you’re seeing in refugee camps, what you’re seeing in places like Janine is resistance, legal resistance actually.

So when Israel uses that as a precursor to then further colonize, it’s just absolutely dumbfounding because it’s just completely violating every single law in the books, and this is what they’ve done for decades. And they’re ramping it up under the cover of the ceasefire of the genocides saying that Hamas fighters are on the ground. Oh, well, they did this. So of course we need to go and eject thousands of people from their homes say that they can never return. And it’s gaslighting upon gaslighting, but it’s also just a refusal of just basic reality and the facts that we know to be true Max. When you apply that to the United States, it is just such a double sighted. I mean, it just a completely absurd notion that we worship. We’re a culture of violence. We worship war. I mean militarism and war is so ingrained in the psyche of American citizens, especially in the wake of nine 11.

It’s just a constant thing. But it’s only the good arbiters of violence. I mean, of course, the US military can do whatever it wants around the world as long as it’s doing it in the name of democracy and human rights. If Ukrainians resist against evil Russia, give them all the weapons in the world, turn it into a proxy war where we’re throwing Ukrainians into just making them cannon fodder. I mean, it’s absolutely insane. But when you’re looking at just the basic tenets of what would you do if someone came to your home and said, get out, this is my home now because the Bible says that it is from thousands of years ago, get the hell out at the barrel of a gun. What would you do? What would your family do? Obviously you would band together and resist like anyone would, especially Americans. I mean, we’re talking about a country that has stand your ground laws that if you just go up and knock on the wrong door, you could get shot and killed legally.

So it is just the paradoxical nature of propaganda. It does not make sense and it does not equate, and it’s only because of the deep, deep embedded dehumanization of Arabs and specifically Palestinians. And this has been part and parcel with the war on terror propaganda, the deep dehumanization of just Arabs and Muslims in general, and Palestinians are just, I mean, it’s absolutely absurd how much they’ve been dehumanized where people, even my fellow colleagues as journalists don’t even consider Palestinian journalists, journalists. So it’s a disgrace upon disgrace. But I think what Muhammad’s talking about is so many salient points there of just the utter hypocrisy of the way that we perceive violence. And when it comes to actual decolonization and liberation, which are concepts that make liberals feel uncomfortable, they’d rather keep Palestinians in a perpetual victimhood and treat them as if they just need aid instead of need freedom. Because when you talk about what that actually means, it means fighting back. It means resisting this unending violence and slaughter. What do these people think it means? So what does that actually look like? How does that play out and how is it successful? And that’s why history is so sanitized, and these things are just rewritten by the victors because they don’t want to teach us the hard lessons of how entire countries and peoples have been victorious and have been liberated from empires and from their colonizers in the past.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah, man, I think that’s powerfully put. And I just wanted to emphasize for folks, when Abby was asking us like, what would you do if someone came in and pointed a gun at you and said, get out of your home. That happened to Muhammad, that happened to him and his family. He became a very prominent international voice, like while settlers were taking over their home from the states. So we’re not asking a rhetorical question here. This is a real question. What would you do in that situation? And in terms of how those rules of engagement he talked about are set by this by definition, hypocritical by definition, like Ill intended entity that does not want us to win, that does not want us to have a leg to stand on. We’re seeing that being baked into this kind of repressive apparatus that is spreading out across the so-called west here to make an example, claiming that Palestine solidarity encampments on a college campus are a threat to the safety of Jewish students while Zionists beating the shit out of student encampment.

Students who are encamping on campus is not categorized in the same violent way. So keep that in mind because I want to kind of focus in here on this sort of the state of repression back here at home as the war across over Palestine. The war on Palestine intensifies because over the past two years, even with the ruling elites in government and this whole imperialist capitalist warmaking establishment doing everything that they could to maintain the longstanding, unconditional support for Israel’s genocidal occupation, ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, while all of that has been going on, we have seen a sea change at the base of societies around the globe, and especially here in the United States, the explosion of the Palestine solidarity movement, mass protests in DC and around the country, the student encampment movement that I mentioned, but the empire is striking back. As you know, Abby, the reactionary ruling class answer to all of this grassroots opposition to Israel’s war on Palestine has been to criminalize the methods of that opposition and to even criminalize and legally recategorize solidarity with Palestinians itself as anti-Semitic, anti-American, and even supportive of terrorism like here in the United States.

For folks who may have forgotten in the first weeks in office of his new administration, president Trump signed an executive order to deport foreign university students who participate in Gaza solidarity protests in a chilling quote fact sheet that accompanied the executive ordered the White House said quote to all the resident aliens who joined in the pro jihadist protests. We put you on notice, come 2025, we will find you and we will deport you and quote, but this is not just happening in the us. Our colleague, Ali Abu Nima, Palestinian American journalist and executive director of the online publication, the Electronic Intifada, traveled to Switzerland last month to give a speech in Zurich. And after being allowed to enter the country, Abu Nima was arrested by plainclothes officers, forced into an unmarked vehicle, held incommunicado in jail for two nights, and then he was deported from the country.

And in Canada, things were getting very dark very quickly. pro-Palestinian Canadian author and activist, Eves Engler was jailed this week for criticizing Zionist influencer Dalia Kurtz on the social media platform, X Kurtz accused angler and his posts of harassment. And he was jailed by Montreal Police for five days. And all of this is happening back in Toronto. The largest school board in Canada has taken steps to adopt the institutional recategorize of Zionists as a protected class and anti-Zionism as antisemitism. And we actually asked our friend and colleague, the brilliant Toronto-based journalist and founder of On the Line Media, Samira Moine to give us a little update on that story. So let’s play that really quick, and then we’re going to go back to Abby.

Samira Mohyeddin:

The decision by the Toronto District School Board to receive this report on antisemitism is dangerous for a number of reasons. The most important being is that the report conflates anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism and moves to make Zionist a protected class of people under the anti-racism policy. So basically a political ideology such as Zionism will now be protected as anything else, will be like race, religion, gender, sexuality. It will fall under that realm, which means that to criticize a political ideology such as Zionism will mean that you will be falling under someone who I don’t know, is critical of someone’s religion, critical of their sexuality. It will actually make it so that this is a weaponization of people who criticize the actions of Israel, which is a state. So this is very dangerous, and we don’t know what sort of effects this will have, what effect will it have on teachers who are teaching history, who are teaching social studies? Does this mean that they can’t criticize Israel? What does this mean for Jewish students who are critical of Israeli actions? Will they be penalized? So there’s a whole realm of things that the Toronto District School Board really doesn’t have answers for yet, and we’re really waiting to see how receiving this report or what even receiving of the report means, what impact it will have, both on parents, on students, and most importantly on teachers who really don’t know how to navigate such a thing. And so this is very, very dangerous.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Okay. Abby Martin, what the hell is going on with all of this? How are you seeing, I guess, the broad sweep of all this repression?

Abby Martin:

I mean, even before the genocide in Gaza, I foresaw the writing on the wall because I myself was engaged in this litigation against the state of Georgia for their anti BDS law. So I knew that states were taking measures to preempt the wave of Palestine solidarity that they inevitably knew would come. And that’s why we’ve seen consulate officials and the Israeli lobby officials going and essentially seeking to undermine our first amendment rights, the constitutionally protected right to boycott a country that was enshrined during the Montgomery Bus boycotts during the civil rights movement. So I knew that pro-Palestine speech was among the most repressed, among the most criminalized because of these laws. And we’ve seen attacks on college campuses even though there’s this kind of notion that right wing speech is what’s heckled and suppressed and repressed on college campuses. I think it’s very clear as day, especially in the wake of the Gaza genocide, that pro-Palestine speech is the most repressed and criminalized speech in the country, even though we have the sacred First Amendment, which unfortunately places like the UK doesn’t.

So you’re seeing raids and arrests of journalists like Aza Wi Stanley from the electronic ADA as well, who was also his electronic communications were seized. I mean, people like Richard Medhurst, they are being arrested and detained with their communications seized and their devices seized under these absurd counter terror powers. I mean, usually the charges don’t stick at the end of the day, but it’s just meant to create a chilling effect and to cement that repressive state where you feel like you can’t even do your job as a journalist. So even though we have the First Amendment, it is not doing much to protect us, especially with what’s happening on college campuses. I mean, the threats even from Israeli government officials saying, you’re never going to have a job again. I mean, it’s just absolutely insane. I don’t even know the words to describe this political climate because like Muhammad articulated so well, it is living in someone else’s hallucination.

It’s like living in a fever dream imposed by someone. It’s just like, what are we even talking about here? You’re telling me that saying from the river to the sea is a terrorist incitement to genocide. While I’m seeing genocide, I’m logging onto my device and seeing a genocide. But you’re saying that people’s words for liberation is the threat. So it’s just this topsy-turvy reality that we’re trying to wade through. Meanwhile, people’s lives are being ruined and destroyed. People are being suspended, expelled. I mean, their jobs are being taken away from them for just speaking facts and just trying to stand in solidarity with people who are being repressed and occupied and killed, and what’s happening to journalists. I mean, the fact that Western powers, European powers are more concerned with criminalizing pro-Palestine journalism and speech, and they are stopping a genocide, really just says it all, doesn’t it?

These institutions, these global bodies that have been in place for the last 70 years to try to prevent the never again to try to stop genocide, at least in the era or the auspices of, and these same institutions have just been made a mockery of by the same states that have created them. I mean, I think we know at this point the rules-based order in these international bodies. It was never designed to really have egalitarianism or to protect all peoples who are oppressed. No, it was to protect and shroud the west with impunity. And when it’s a western ally that’s committing genocide in plain day, well, we see exactly what these institutions are designed to do. And we’ve seen the threats, the ICC sanctions against the members of the court, their families, what’s happening in South Africa from the Trump administration. It is an upside down world where drone bombings are not terrorism because that’s just seen as normal day-to-day operations of the empire, and its junior collaborators and its colonial outposts.

But words and incitement, all of these things are unacceptable. And so that’s what you’re seeing. You’re seeing an extreme policing of our language and intent, intent. Meanwhile, the people who are ruling the world, the global elite, can do whatever they want out of the shadows, plain as day, commit genocide and ethnic cleansing and boast about it and make all of us just scurry like mice trying to catch up. Meanwhile, we can’t say shit. And so it’s a war on the mind. It’s a war on our thoughts. It is beyond even an information war. I mean, it is a war on reality itself,

Maximillian Alvarez:

And those of us who are trying to report on it mean we didn’t even mention it, but there’s on top of everything, there’s the nonprofit killer Bill HR 9 4 9 5 or the stop terror financing and tax penalties on American Hostages Act that already passed the House of Representatives going to pass the Senate at some point. But that’s another thing that I think about daily because I am the co-executive director and editor in chief of a nonprofit journalism outlet. And this bill if passed, would effectively give the Trump administration the ability to unilaterally declare that orgs like ours are terrorist supporting, not because we’re providing material support for Hamas or anything like that, but because our speech, the way we report honestly about the genocide in Palestine is being re-categorized as support for terrorism. And so we could lose our nonprofit status that’s going to kill most nonprofits that get targeted.

It won’t kill all of them, but it’ll be a massive financial hit. But also the leaders of those orgs could be held personally liable. They could be attacked, like this is something that I have to think about and talk to my family about all the time. I mean this plus the firings of tenured professors at universities threats to deport foreign students who are participating in protests, locking up journalists for social media posts. This is a really intense and dark time. And while all of this is happening, Elon Musk and is leading a techno fascist coup in our government, and I want to end there in a second, but by way of getting there, since we’ve got you on, and since you mentioned it, Abby, of course, you, Abby Martin, were famously at the center of this critical free speech battle against Georgia Southern University when the university rescinded the offer to have you deliver a keynote speech because you refuse to sign a BS contract that illegally stipulated speakers were forbidden from openly supporting any boycott of Israel. So I wanted to ask if, just by way of getting us to the final turn, if there are any lessons that you learned even from just the decision to fight that we could really internalize and need to internalize to face what we’re facing today?

Abby Martin:

Yes, I think it’s a multi-pronged battle, and we have to utilize every arm of the fight. I mean, the courts are absolutely one important facet that we need to utilize. I think if there were plaintiffs in every state taking on these BDS laws, then hopefully it will go to the Supreme Court, even though they said that they didn’t want to hear it. Right Now, there are enough mixed verdicts that would bring this to the attention of the Supreme Court, and I think if anyone is trained in constitutional law, well, we don’t know about these Trump appointees, but I mean anyone who knows the Constitution would say it’s very clear these are flagrantly unconstitutional laws, and hopefully we would put an end to it. But I think that they’re just so desperate and they know that it’s going to take, it’s a long slog to challenge all these laws, but we absolutely have to have in every single state.

And that’s just one part of it, max. I mean, the media, obviously, the fact that Elon Musk has taken over our town hall, he is, I mean, on one hand what Trump and Elon Musk are doing is kind of exposing the incestuous relationship with the so-called legacy media and the way that the political establishment operates within it. But on the other hand, it’s very scary because they’re maneuvering it all to consolidate it with the right wings, sphere of influence, and using this kind of populist fake news rhetoric to do that. And that’s very disturbing and damaging because as leftists and people who are trying to do citizen journalism for grassroots organizing and things like that, we are in for a very tough road ahead because we don’t have billionaire funding like they do. But I would say my biggest lesson learned is that we have to take on every part of the battle they have. I mean, they’ve planned for 50 years taking over the institutions, taking over the media and taking over the courts, and we are 10 steps behind and we have to do everything in our power. And that means day in and day out. It’s not pulling the lever every two to four years. It’s being a part of this active struggle to maintain democratic rights, human rights, and try to have some sort of international solidarity with the people living under the boot of our policies.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Let’s keep talking about that in this last 15 minutes that we’ve got here. One of the many folks that I’ve been thinking about a lot since Trump was inaugurated, really wondering what your analysis of all of this is. And so many of us are trying to figure out and articulate what is actually happening. I just interviewed three federal workers, two of whom were illegally fired for the podcast working people. We published it yesterday. Folks should go listen to what they have to say. It’s really important. But even there, we’re talking about battling the narrative that Musk himself and Trump and the whole administration and Fox News and these rejiggered algorithms on social media that are platforming and pushing more right-wing narratives. All of that is saying that this is all done in the name of efficiency that Trump and Musk are out there cutting government waste, attacking the corrupt deep state that’s getting in the way of the will of the American people. But if you talk to federal workers, they’re like, no, that’s not what they’re doing at all. They are slashing the hell out of it. They are just non-surgically destroying government agencies, laying groups of people off and throwing the government into disarray. None of this is done in the name of efficiency, and we shouldn’t even be taking that at face value when the guy who’s telling us that it’s being done in the name of efficiency is giving Ziggy salutes on public stages. So maybe we should stop assuming as the great

Abby Martin:

Adam Johnson said, it’s a stiff, armed, awkward gesture,

Maximillian Alvarez:

Stiff arm, Roman stiff

Abby Martin:

Arm, Roman salute in an awkward gesture.

Maximillian Alvarez:

It is nuts, but it’s just like, maybe the point being is, hey, maybe this guy is acting ideologically, maybe he’s acting self interestedly. Why do we keep buying the narrative that he’s acting uninterested in just the name of efficiency? That’s insane. It requires us to ignore the reality in front of our faces. But again, I wanted to bring us back to this point because everything we’ve been talking about now from tanks in the West Bank, the potential of the Gaza ceasefire falling apart, criminalization and crackdown on free speech and protest across the west, all of that is happening while like Elon Musk, the richest man in the world and the unelected destroyer of government agencies is literally and figuratively like on a maniacal chainsaw, wielding rampage through the institutional guts of what remains of liberal democracy and the administrative state. And so this all feels so overwhelming, and I think most folks, because they know what you just said is right, that we’re playing so far behind and they have seemingly all the control, the impulse is going to be to close off to protect what’s ours, to hide, to silence ourselves. So I wanted to ask you, with those last few minutes we’ve got, what is your analysis of what’s happening in our government right now and what does this all mean for how do we move forward and keep fighting for what’s right and good, even though it’s getting really perilous and really dangerous out there? Oh

Abby Martin:

My God. I mean, it’s really difficult. And looking at the lessons gleaned from the Iraq war era when I was radicalized and activated to do media work and activism, what was different about that time was the fact that there was a more multi-pronged kind of united front with a lot of libertarians who were disaffected, a lot more like right wingers who hated the Bush administration. There seems to be a cult-like emergence of the sycophant, worshiping of a figure like Donald Trump. And that’s what’s so disturbing about MAGA in general and by proxy, someone like Elon Musk, a South African oligarch as well as the whole PayPal Mafia, all these oligarchs from South Africa coming over here and just seizing government control, which is completely illegal. I mean, that doesn’t even really need to be said, all the unconstitutional nature of what they’re doing, but it’s just so perplexing because of the way that he’s been able to siphon support from people who historically would not necessarily just worship a billionaire.

I mean, back decades ago it was the Republican party was kind of cartoonishly, just so detached from the working class because it was just so clearly just a party for billionaires and tax breaks for the wealthy. But because of the abject failure of the Democrats to form any sort of opposition, I mean, what is their project 2025? There is no goal. There’s no vision. They’re scrambling to figure out how could they even stand in opposition to what’s going on their 10 steps behind, but because of their failure and their ineptitude and the lies and the propaganda and the media manipulation and the war, the war on terror, because they’ve failed so horribly and mirrored Republicans on so much naturally, you’ve seen this kind of faux populism reroute a lot of disaffected people into the Republican party. And for the first time we saw people who were under a hundred thousand dollars or less actually vote en mass for Trump.

This is an unprecedented shift, a tectonic shift in how these parties have really played out. So I would argue the failure of the Democrats have driven people into the hands of Trump, and it doesn’t matter if it’s fake or not, they want someone to blame for their problems. And they look at Trump and they say, yeah, immigrants, trans people, sure, whatever will help solve my basically buffer my reality. They want people to say what is wrong and who’s doing it. That’s why Bernie resonated so much. I mean, he pointed to the oligarchic class, he pointed to the people, the actual robber barons who consolidated all of the wealth during the Covid era, but now we’re in this really bizarre, weirdly entrenched new Trump regime where he’s folded in all of the tech overlords, who, by the way, all the DEI rhetoric and all the people who are like corporations are woke, woke and liberalism have taken over and dominated our culture.

Actually, it was just the notion that women should have rights and gay people should be out because you saw the virtue signaling completely go by the wayside. The second that everyone resigned to the fact that Trump was going to be president again, what happened with Google, don’t be evil. All of these people who were actually protesting the Muslim ban and had really strong rhetoric against Trump back in 2016, they’re completely folded in just seamlessly because it never was about that. It was all virtue signaling. They were always right wing. They always didn’t care that Trump was who he is. I mean, it really is just so obvious. The ruling class never really cared about Trump or his policies or the threat of fascism or the erosion of democracy. They just cared that he was a bull in a China shop. He was just unpredictable. He was uncouth, and all they care about is that peaceful transition of power, and the system just keeps going, and the status quo just keeps churning on.

And that’s why January 6th was such an abomination for them. It wasn’t because of anything else. And so now I think everything’s been exposed. Everything is clear as day. That’s why we don’t see anything. There’s no actual opposition forming. And when you look at the grassroots and all the mobilized efforts, I mean, I think there’s such a fatigue with activism because for the last 15 months, people have been out in the streets opposing biden’s subsidization and oversight of genocide. So now we’re supposed to go and fight tooth and nail against the fascist takeover of the government. It’s like, God damn, for the last 15 months we’ve been out in the streets and no one’s been listening to us about stopping genocide. So I mean, it’s such a dizzying, disorienting time intentionally, the shock and awe of this mass firings of federal workers, the thousands and thousands of federal workers, it’s so clear as day what they’re doing.

They’re just gutting in the interim. They’re trying to do as much damage as they can because they know that the time that the courts basically do their jobs, it’s going to be too late. Trump has stacked enough courts at the end of the day, and Republicans have that. Even if there’s a million challenges legally, the damage is going to be done. You can’t pick up the pieces and just go back to the way things were. And that’s the intent. For all intents and purposes, they’re trying to gut any sort of semblance of institutions that care for people. Cruelty is the point. Poor people, elderly people, disabled people, those are who are going to be the brunt of these services that are being cut. The veterans affairs, I mean, all these people from the crisis hotline, all these veterans who are calling with suicidal ideation, those people are being cut Medicaid.

I mean, the statistic flying around 880 billion, that’s the entirety of Medicaid. So when they’re talking about, oh, these budget cuts are going to cut 880 billion from this one committee, yeah, that’s the entirety of Medicaid. Who is that going to affect 73 million Americans? I mean, the shortsightedness of all of this is just astonishing, but that’s not the point. They know how much damage it’s going to do. They don’t care. They want to gut everything and privatize everything, the post office, the va, every last bastion of government services that work that are good and healthy for a democratic society, and it’s going to do so much damage. I mean, just the environmental damage, the environmental damage. And what’s so funny, all of the discussions, people like to take everything that Trump says at face value. They’re like, oh, well, he says he wants to cut the Pentagon budget in half.

Oh, well, really, because on the other side of his mouth, he’s saying the exact opposite, that he wants to increase the Pentagon budget for this, that and the other. And when you look at what Hegseth is saying about what they’re actually cutting, it’s all the climate change initiatives that they were all the cursory attempts to try to placate environmentalists like, no, no, no. We’re greening this global military empire. So it’s just all, it’s so bad in every way, but I would just urge people to just not feel overwhelmed with the barrage of news, the rapid fire nature of the algorithm. Our brains are not meant to digest news in this way or information in this way. Let Max and I do it. Let us do it. Don’t get overwhelmed by the day to day just paralysis of the shock and awe of what they’re doing because that’s the intent. You cannot get paralyzed. You cannot just detach yourself from this. We have to be plugged in to the capacity that you can. We have to all be plugged into how we can all make a dent in our lives and let Max and I do the dirty work of sorting through the propaganda on the day to day. But it’s going to be a really tough road ahead, Max.

Maximillian Alvarez:

It is, and I appreciate everything that you said, and I just kind of had a final tiny question. I know we got a wrap, but on that last point, because Abby and I, our whole team here at the Real News, everyone you see on screen and also everyone, you don’t who makes everything that we produce possible. We’re going to keep manning our posts. We’re going to keep doing our work. We’re going to keep speaking the truth. But as you have learned from this conversation, there may be a great cost to pay for that. And I think that’s also something that we all need to sit with and think about because people don’t ask to be kind of in the moments in history they find theirselves in, but how we respond to those moments defines who we are as people, as generations and as movements. And so Abby, I didn’t go to journalism school.

I don’t know if you did. I never set out to be a journalist. I never thought I would find myself sitting in this chair as the executive director, co-executive director and editor in chief of a nonprofit journalism outlet. But if I can think back to even my early days, the through line from then to here, I was raised by great people who taught me to stand up for what’s right and speak my truth, especially speak it unwaveringly in the face of those who want to shut me up. And I’m not someone who shuts up easily. That’s probably why I’m here. That’s why Abby’s doing what she does. If you try to shut her up, she’ll file a lawsuit against your ass and win it, right? I mean, but there’s a non-zero chance that being who we are, doing what we do, because we’re going to do it.

We’re going to do it for you. We’re going to do it because it’s right. There’s a non-zero chance we could end up in prison for it or have our outlet shut down, but that just is what it is. And so Abby, with that kind of on the table, I just wanted to ask if you had any kind of parting words to folks out there who depend on our journalism, folks out there who do journalism, any final notes about the real state that we’re in, what we’re facing, but also how we need to be kind of stealing our hearts to keep fighting for what’s right and not allowing ourselves to be silenced, even though they’re going to try really hard to do so?

Abby Martin:

Absolutely. I mean, it’s going to be so hard for just average Americans and workers who are suffering the brunt of these policies. Obviously it’s going to be really hard for them to engage in the struggle because they’re worried about how they’re going to survive day to day. They have no savings and their living paycheck to paycheck, and it’s just going to get worse. I mean, look, I became a journalist out of necessity because I saw the failure of the institutional media and the legacy media and the drive to the Iraq war, and I realized that it didn’t matter if I was standing in a street corner with a sign. I mean, no one’s going to hear what you have to say unless you advocate through a media avenue. I mean, you have to utilize the tools that we have available to speak these truths, to speak powers truth to power, to hold, power to account.

And we’re in a very dystopian era where again, words are considered terrorist incitement, especially when it comes to pro-Palestine advocacy. I run a nonprofit as well. Empire Files is a nonprofit, and it’s this paradox where you have our job revenues and our ability to tell this information potentially being threatened with shut down. Meanwhile, you have charities very active and lucrative, being able to fund people from America to go over and take over a Palestinian family’s home, like literally, nonprofit charities can go fund a genocidal army to kill Palestinians for sport. So that’s the world that we’re living in. It’s a very topsy turvy world set by actually a crime syndicate and a global mafia. And the enforcer is the US military. I am in a place of privilege to the point where I can at least speak these facts. We’re not living under a totalitarian dictatorship yet where our First Amendment is completely gone.

So I will continue to speak out and speak these facts and hold power to account and speak the truth as I see it and not be played or propagandized by the billionaire class. I am happy that at least we can rise above this deep seated propaganda where they’re telling us black is white and saying, no, this multi-billion dollar propaganda apparatus does not work on me. And we’re able to see things clearly, and we’re going to speak those truths clearly no matter where they take us, because Max, I think you and I both know that even though it’s a dangerous road ahead, we’re not going to stop doing our jobs. We’re going to speak truth to power, and we see what’s happening to our colleagues. But you know what? I’m going to keep speaking truth to power because my colleagues are being gunned down, mowed down systematically.

And so until that threat is on my doorstep, you’re not going to be able to shut me up, man. You’re not going to be able to shut me up because my friends are being killed. And I take that very seriously because a threat to justice anywhere means that injustice is still rooted everywhere. So we have to keep fighting because we can’t stop. We’re going to let these criminals win. We’re going to let them destroy the planet and kill off the sake of any viable habitat for our children. We’re going to let that happen. No. Yes, the odds are stacked against us. Yes, the institutions have completely been hijacked by these maniacs, these genocidal maniacs and sociopaths. But that’s not enough to stop us. We have to keep fighting. We have no other choice. And even if we lose, well, we sure as hell tried. We sure as hell tried, and we owe it to every person on this planet that is living under the boot of our policies that doesn’t have the privilege of being an American citizen.

That’s just dealing with the brunt of the effects of sanctions, of war, of bombings, of this economic terrorism. We owe it to them and we owe it to the kids that we’ve brought into this world. We cannot stop, max. We cannot stop. And history has been stacked before. Yes, the crisis is more existential with the environmental calamities that we’re facing, but we’ve been in deep crises before slavery, the civil rights, I mean, not people literally living in abject slavery. We have to continue to fight for the better future that we know is possible. I would not be able to live with myself if I gave up. It’s not an option. It’s not an option.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Wholeheartedly agree sis. And I love you, and I’m in solidarity with you, and I’m as scared as I think I’ll ever be, but I’m not going to stop either. So it’s an honor to be in this struggle with you and to all of you watching again, we will continue to speak truth to power, and we will continue fighting for the truth and speaking that truth to empower you because that is also why we do what we do. Because when working people have the truth, the powerful cannot take that away from us. And it is the truth that we need to know how to act because we are ultimately the ones who are going to decide how this history is written. I don’t know what’s going to happen in the next few years, but I know what will happen if we regular people, people of conscious do nothing.

If we do nothing, I can tell you what’s going to happen. But what happens next is up to us and Abby, the Real News, all of our colleagues who are out there fighting for the truth. We’ll keep doing that as long as we possibly can to empower you to be the change that we need to see in this world because this world is worth fighting for and the future is worth fighting for, and it’s not gone yet. So thank you all for fighting. Thank you for caring. Abby Martin, thank you so much for coming on The Real News yet again, thank you for all the invaluable work that you do. Can you please just tell folks one more time where they can find you, how they can support your work? And then I promise we’ll let you go.

Abby Martin:

Max, thank you so much. I couldn’t agree more. I mean, the love and the family are in the struggle. And for people who may be feeling really isolated out in the middle of nowhere and feel, what can I do? I’m totally just immobilized from all of this. The paralysis from our political state of affairs, I mean, reach out. It is literally the most important thing you could do is reach out to your like-minded people in your area, go on meetup groups, figure out what people are doing to just generate activism with whatever issue because that is where the love and the family and the friendships are is the struggle and getting involved, and that’s going to take you out of this kind of atomization that the system imposes on us. I love Real News Network. I’m so honored to be on Anytime Max, I’m honored to call you a friend in a comrade. People can find my work at Empire Files, the Empire Files tv, and also our new documentary is going to come out this year. I’m really excited about it. Earth’s greatest enemy.com. Thank you so much again.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Oh yeah, thank you sis. And all you watching that is the great Abby Martin, if you are not already, please, please, please go subscribe to her channel. The Empire Files support the work that she’s doing, and please support the work that we’re doing here at The Real News. We cannot keep doing it without you, and we do it for you. So please, before you go subscribe to this channel, become a member of our YouTube community, please donate to The Real News by going to the real news.com/donate, especially if you want to see more conversations like this and more coverage from the front lines of struggle around the US and across the world. And for all of us here at the Real News Network, this is Maximilian Alvarez signing off. Please take care of yourselves, take care of each other, solidarity forever. Thank you so much for watching The Real News Network, where we lift up the voices, stories and struggles that you care about most, and we need your help to keep doing this work. So please tap your screen now, subscribe and donate to the Real News Network. Solidarity forever.

Trump’s threats of tariffs on Canada, China, and Mexico have wreaked havoc on US relations with its closest trade partners. While the tariffs against Canada and Mexico have been deferred by a month, lasting damage has likely been done to US relations with the only countries with which it shares land borders. The fallout of the trade spat is already remaking Canadian politics, with many wondering whether the dispute has truly ended given Trump’s repeated calls for the US to annex its northern neighbor. How will all of this shape Canada’s already tumultuous political situation, with Justin Trudeau having just announced that he was stepping down as the country’s Prime Minister, with a high-stakes national election in October looming, and with Canada taking its own rightward political turn led by Pierre Poilievre? What impact will these trade wars have on working people across North America, and how can we fuse our common struggles across borders? 

Andrea Houston of Ricochet Media, Desmond Cole of The Breach, and independent journalist and founder of On The Line Media Samira Mohyeddin join The Real News for a cross-border discussion on US-Canadian relations, and the urgent need to build solidarity among US and Canadian workers in the face of Trump’s destabilizing agenda.

Studio Production: David Hebden, Adam Coley

Transcript

Maximillian Alvarez:  Welcome to The Real News Network, and welcome back to our weekly livestream.

President Donald Trump sparked waves of panic, confusion, disbelief, betrayal, and anger this weekend after announcing on Saturday that he would be imposing 25% tariffs on imports from Mexico and Canada, and a lower 10% tariff on Canadian oil, natural gas, and electricity. Trump’s announcement also included new 10% tariffs on Chinese goods.

Now, these are in addition to existing tariffs on Chinese products, and already two thirds of all US trade with China is around under 20% tariffs, which Trump imposed during his first term. And the Biden administration actually raised tariff rates to 100% on electric vehicles, 50% on solar cells, and up to 25% on select products like EV batteries, critical minerals, steel, aluminum, and face masks.

Now, Canada and Mexico are the two largest trading partners of the US. China is the third. Together, they account for over 40% of all imports into the US, according to data from the United States International Trade Commission.

Now, tariffs are taxes imposed by the government on imported goods, and those taxes are paid to the government by the American buyers of those foreign goods. Often, those higher costs are passed on to the consumer either because prices for the same goods are now higher and businesses just don’t want to eat those costs themselves, or because domestic supply of those goods decreases as a result of the tariffs and the demand in price in the domestic market increases. Either way, the point is that we would feel the brunt of it.

Now, Trump repeatedly waved away concerns that the cost of his tariffs would be borne by regular people already hurting from punishing inflation and an ongoing cost of living crisis. On Friday before announcing the new tariffs. Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that tariffs don’t cause inflation, they cause something else. Let’s take a listen.

[CLIP BEGINS]

President Donald Trump:  Tariffs don’t cause inflation. They cause success. They cause big success. So we’re going to have great success. There could be some temporary short-term disruption, and people will understand that…

[CLIP ENDS]

Maximillian Alvarez:  So that short-term disruption is worth it and these tariffs are necessary, according to Trump, in order to correct what he has long called an unfair trade arrangement between the United States and the rest of the world — And to supposedly force America’s neighbors and trading partners to do more to stop illegal immigration and the flow of fentanyl into the United States. The White House actually said on Saturday after announcing the tariffs, “The extraordinary threat posed by illegal aliens and drugs, including deadly fentanyl, constitutes a national emergency under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). […] President Trump is taking bold action to hold Mexico, Canada, and China accountable to their promises of halting illegal immigration and stopping poisonous fentanyl and other drugs from flowing into our country.”

So Trump’s tariffs on all Chinese products already went into effect at midnight on Tuesday, and Beijing quickly hit back. As The New York Times reports, “The Chinese government came back with a series of retaliatory steps, including additional tariffs on liquified natural gas, coal, farm machinery and other products from the United States.” It also said it had “implemented restrictions on the export of certain critical minerals, many of which are used in the production of high-tech products. In addition, Chinese market regulators said they had launched an antimonopoly investigation into Google.”

Now, Canada and Mexico, on the other hand, managed to avoid the same fate as China — For now. At the 11th hour after this whole melodramatic Trumpian spectacle played out into Monday, President Trump spoke with Mexican president, Claudia Scheinbaum, and Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, and agreed to a 30-day pause on his tariff threat. At 5:00 PM on Monday, Trump posted to Truth Social: “I am [very] pleased with this initial outcome, and the Tariffs announced on Saturday will be paused for a 30 day period to see whether or not a final Economic deal with Canada can be structured. FAIRNESS FOR ALL!” he wrote in all caps.

So Trump’s line about reaching a final economic deal with Canada is pretty much a direct sign that this was never just about immigration and fentanyl. And minutes before Trump’s announcement on Monday, Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau posted himself on the platform X: “I just had a good call with President Trump. Canada is implementing our $1.3 billion border plan — reinforcing the border with new choppers, technology and personnel, enhanced coordination with our American partners, and increased resources to stop the flow of fentanyl. Nearly 10,000 frontline personnel are and will be working on protecting the border. In addition, Canada is making new commitments to appoint a Fentanyl Czar, we will list cartels as terrorists, ensure 24/7 eyes on the border, launch a Canada-US Joint Strike Force to combat organized crime, fentanyl and money laundering. I have also signed a new intelligence directive on organized crime and fentanyl and we will be backing it with $200 million.”

So what does this deal with Canada to avoid this week’s tariffs actually mean in practice? What deals are going to be struck, and what concessions are going to be extracted in the future under Trump’s tariff threats? What the hell is going on, and what does this all look like from the Canada side? How will all of this shape Canada’s already tumultuous political situation, with Trudeau having just announced that he was stepping down as the country’s prime minister, with Canada now facing its own high-stakes election in October? And with the country, like many around the world, taking its own hard right turn — And with a very Trump-like, but also very uniquely Canadian, far-right figure ascending in Pierre Poilievre? What impact will these trade wars have on working people across North America, and how can we help each other understand what’s happening with an international perspective? And how can we fuse our common struggles across borders?

We’re going to dig into all of this today, and I really could not be more honored and excited to have this incredible panel of journalists, media makers, colleagues, and collaborators joining us today from across the border in Canada.

Joining us today, we’ve got Samira Mohyeddin. Samira is a journalist and broadcaster and founder of On The Line Media. We’ve got Desmond Cole. Desmond is a journalist based in Toronto, and he is currently working with The Breach, an independent media outlet in Canada. He is also the author of the bestselling 2020 book The Skin We’re In: A Year of Black Resistance and Power. And last but certainly not least, we’ve got Andrea Houston, who has spent more than two decades as a journalist, human rights advocate, and journalism instructor. Andrea is currently the managing editor of Ricochet Media in Canada. She is also an instructor at Toronto Metropolitan University School of Journalism, where she developed and teaches Canada’s first ever queer media course.

So Samira, Andrea, Desmond, thank you all so much for joining me on The Real News today. It’s been a hell of a week, but I’m so grateful to have you all here.

Desmond Cole:  Thank you.

Andrea Houston:  Thanks for having us

Maximillian Alvarez:  As always, I wish it was under better circumstances, but I could not think of a better panel to help us dig in to all of this.

Before we really dig into the real meat and potatoes of the deal that was struck this week and what this all means moving forward, I want to do a quick round around the table, and take us back to this weekend. I want to ask what this all looked like and felt like from where you guys are sitting. Because after Trump’s announcement on Saturday, like he was squeezing lighter fuel onto a barbecue, Trump escalated fears about what’s behind this massive impending trade war with Canada when he posted on Sunday on Truth Social: “We pay hundreds of Billions of Dollars to SUBSIDIZE Canada. Why? There is no reason,” Trump says. “We don’t need anything they have. We have unlimited Energy, should make our own Cars, and we have more Lumber than we could ever use. Without this massive subsidy, Canada ceases to exist as a viable Country. Harsh but true! Therefore, Canada should become our Cherished 51st State. Much lower taxes, and far better military protection for the people of Canada — AND,” he writes in all caps, “NO TARIFFS!”

So Samira, Desmond, Andrea, what do you see when you see our president posting batshit stuff like this? Walk us through what this weekend was like for you. Samira, let’s start with you.

Samira Mohyeddin:  It’s just full of sound and fury signifying nothing. Canada’s not going to become the 51st state. It’s just absurd. We do, just on a daily basis, there’s about $3.6 billion worth of trade coming across the borders. So America needs Canada just as much as Canada needs America.

What I can say, though, is that what’s really interesting is seeing this Canadian nationalism, because we’re not really rah rah rah, sis boom bah type people here. We’re quite muted in our patriotism. So there’s a lot of buy local happening, grocery stores putting up signs showing you exactly what is and isn’t Canadian — These are Peruvian grapes that I’m enjoying. So that’s been really interesting to watch.

I didn’t go through the weekend thinking, oh my God, the tariffs are coming. That is not something that scares me, but I’m seeing the ripple effects of the politicians here and how they’re responding. Like our premier here in Ontario manufactured hats saying “Canada is not for sale”. all the politicians are finding ways so that they could flex their patriotic muscles. That has been really interesting to watch for me.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Yeah, it’s like truly the Trumpian age where everything is a branding opportunity, for Christ’s sake. Andrea, what about you [laughs]? And then Desmond, let’s go to you.

Andrea Houston:  I think for me, like Samira, I was less focused on the tariffs and more focused on some of the other announcements that were coming out that were absolutely gut wrenching and sickening and heartbreaking all at once. What we’re seeing right now is a fire hose of news. We’re just seeing constant bad announcements, bad decisions, and executive orders meant to confuse and overwhelm us.

So what I was really focused on was the USAID cuts and the loss of foreign aid and the impacts of that, the devastating loss of life that we’re going to see. I sit on the board of a small NGO in Uganda, an LGBTQ NGO in Uganda, and it’s just one of many that will likely see the impacts of this. Everything from HIV-positive people not getting their meds, which could result in a generation of babies being born who are HIV positive because their mothers didn’t get the medication for even a pause. That is the devastation that this can have. That is really what I was focusing on and absolutely in pain over, what this is going to have on a global stage.

We are seeing an unelected, unaccountable non-American who is directing some of the most important political [people] in the world and how it impacts the lives of everyday people, not just in America, but around the world. He’s even called USAID evil. This impacts 25 million people who are living with AIDS around the world, HIV/AIDS, who are suddenly, without warning, cut off from life-saving medications. This is nothing short of a crime against humanity.

Honestly, all of this has been, in many ways, predicted. This is all playing out very much in how, at least, I have been saying it’s going to play out. And many people that I’ve gone to parties with have heard me talking like, we’re going to see a dictator probably rise in North America. Trump is going to come back. Trump is going to win again. To me, this is not shocking. All of this, watching the history of especially the last 10 years, shows that this has all been written out for us. We’ve seen the patterns of this. So it’s really surprising to me how so many Americans seem really blindsided by all of this. This is an assault on democracy by far-right extremists, and I think the only way we have to fight against it is doing exactly what we’re doing right now, is talking in very frank terms about what we’re seeing. We’re seeing a dictatorship rise.

Maximillian Alvarez:  I think that was beautifully, powerfully put.

Desmond, how about you, man? What was this weekend like for you? What are you seeing when you’re seeing all this shit?

Desmond Cole:  Thanks for the invitation, Max, and it’s really great to be here with Samira and with Andrea.

The circus is back in town, isn’t it? Here we are. I think that the game of people like Donald Trump is to suck all the energy from the room, is to try and force everybody to pay attention only to them. Nothing exists except what they want. Trade is no good because trade benefits two sides instead of only the United States. Me, me, me, he baby trying to grab every toy at the same time. We’ve known what this is about and we’ve seen it before. I find it exhausting.

So it’s not about pretending it’s not happening and tuning it out, but I have been trying, since last weekend, to think about what are the things that are going to be missed in the wake of this crisis? What are we, on a domestic level in Canada, marginalizing while we turn so much energy and attention towards this threat of tariffs?

We have a provincial election happening in Ontario right now. Our premier, Doug Ford, wanted, initially, to have an election early — You can call your own elections here in the parliamentary system of Ontario and of Canada — So Doug Ford chose to decide to have an election earlier than the end of his term, and he wanted to run against Justin Trudeau, the prime minister, because Justin Trudeau is very unpopular and very weak right now. So Ford’s idea was, I’m going to have an election and I’m going to campaign against this other guy in another jurisdiction who will make me look strong by comparison.

Then, of course, Justin Trudeau announced that he was resigning, so now you can’t campaign against him anymore. What do you do? And here comes Trump, and here comes the tariff threat. And so Doug Ford says, ah, I’ll just pivot to running against the president of another country, and I’ll talk about how I’m going to keep you safe from him and all of the threats that he poses to business and to our economy.

And it’s working out quite well, I have to say, strategically, for Doug Ford. The only problem is that we have a dramatically underfunded healthcare system in Ontario that’s been devastated by COVID and no one’s talking about it. We have, I don’t even want to call it a housing crisis because the housing situation in Ontario is happening on purpose to the benefit of landlords and developers, but against the interests of, particularly, tenants. We have an explosion of homeless people, of tents popping up in every town and city across the province of Ontario because people cannot afford to pay rent anymore. These things are becoming secondary to how do we fight Trump? How do we all fight Trump? Even if the premier, for example, doesn’t negotiate directly with Trump on a daily basis, and that’s not his job, it’s still all funneling down towards this conversation.

We’re also seeing things like Pierre Poillievre has been mentioned, the Conservative leader who wants to take over for Justin Trudeau, and we’ll probably be having an election at the federal level shortly. That conversation has shifted as well because Pierre Poilievre for, what, two years now, has been telling us that the next election in Canada was going to be about whether or not we have a carbon tax, and he can’t do that anymore because this conversation about tariffs and protecting ourselves from America has become so dominant that it’s like if you don’t play into that paradigm now, you’re not really talking about anything.

So it has changed the conversations that we’re having here politically, and I don’t think that that’s for the better because while we do have to address the issue of tariffs and our trade situation with the United States, we’ve got a lot of other things going on in this country. We can’t live or die by whether or not we buy fruits and vegetables from our country instead of America, whether we support Galen Weston and corporate billionaires in Canada instead of supporting corporate billionaires in the United States. That’s not going to really materially change things for us.

So I had some fun on Twitter on Sunday memeing about having to give up my Cherry Blasters and Oreos because of this intending trade war. And I do try to have a little bit of fun and lightness with it because I don’t want to talk about this shit. I want to talk about the things that I do as a journalist on a daily basis that relate to immigration, housing, policing, things that are affecting people in their local communities, the rates of welfare and disability. I want to talk about the things that allow people to live a decent life here on the day-to-day. And again, I’m not saying tariffs don’t factor into that, but we cannot eschew the rest of our political responsibilities to fight the president of another country.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Well, I think that’s a really powerful and poignant point and something that we mentioned on a previous livestream with Medi Hassan and Francesca Fiorentini, and a subject that I spoke with Sara Nelson about, the international president of the Association of Flight Attendants. And Sara, let’s not forget, became a household name during the Trump-led government shutdown in 2019 when she called for a general strike to end the shutdown. And within a day the shutdown ended after 35 days, the longest shutdown in US history.

And out of that example, Sara really gave us a poignant lesson that you were articulating there, Desmond, is that we cannot define our struggle solely by how we respond to Trump. We have to have a shared basis of understanding of what we are fighting for as working people, what our needs are and our methods of getting those needs met. It can’t just all be reactive. We have to be moving forward and advancing the clearly defined causes that unite working people across red states, blue states, union, non-union, and even across North America and beyond. If we don’t have that shared basic understanding of what we’re fighting for, then we’re going to be exhausted by the end of year one of the Trump administration because all we’re doing is fighting against what’s coming, and there’s always more coming.

So we’re going to talk about this more as the stream goes on. Before we talk about the details of the trade deal and what this portends moving forward, I want to use a few minutes here to address some of what you guys were already bringing up because we have folks tuning in across the United States and even in Canada — The Real News was actually founded in Canada, so it’s all in the family here. But we know that folks in the US and Canada do not have the shared basis of understanding of what’s going on in Canadian politics right now.

And so I want to just spend a few minutes here clarifying our terms and letting folks know, especially here in the US, what the basic context is. What do they need to understand right now about Canadian politics for the rest of our discussion to make sense? You mentioned Poilievre, we mentioned the upcoming elections and how this is already changing the dynamic. Do we all have a shared understanding of what a tariff is? So let’s take just five to eight minutes here to just clarify any terms that we feel need to be clarified for everything else to make sense. So Samira, let’s start again with you.

Samira Mohyeddin:  A tariff is a tax on goods coming from another country. That is what a tariff is. Actually, I’m constantly looking up what a tariff is. But this is not something that just affects Canadians. When you put a tariff on us, it affects Americans. What is so asinine and absurd is that Trump never talks about the fact that the tariff affects the domestic business that buys that product. So American business owners will be just as affected by high tariffs on Canada. That’s the absurdity of what Trump is doing. But that’s never talked about, unfortunately, when he talks about this.

And then at the same time, you’re seeing very different reactions to this imposition of tariffs when it comes, if it comes, from the different political parties here. Poilievre, for instance, has taken this route that many people have talked about before, but which is to reduce the barriers that are here between interprovincial businesses. So we have provinces here in Canada, and there are barriers that they’re pushing to have taken away. For instance, if I’m in Ontario, I can’t get wines from British Columbia because the LCBO has this sort of monopoly on what comes in and what goes out. So that’s the route that Poilievre is taking in pushing back on this. But everyone is wearing a different patriotic hat in looking at how to respond to tariffs.

And then you have Mark Carney, who’s showing himself as being the outsider. He’s supposed to take over. He’s the new running for the Liberal leadership — We have a leadership race here, also, as you said, Trudeau has stepped down. So there is that aspect too. Carney was running the Bank of England. He was running the Bank of Canada before. So everybody is coming at this in a different way.

But I really firmly believe that Trump is just doing this whole tariff thing to divert attention away from, really, a coup that is taking place within America. And I know that some people say, oh, he is just an idiot. I say that at times, but I firmly believe that this is dangerous. I really think that people do need to respond to what is happening and what Trump is doing. And if it’s not taking to the streets, I really think that something needs to happen in the US.

And I hope this is a bit of a wake-up call, not only for people in the United States, but for people in Canada. I have a lot of friends in the food industry, for instance, who for years have been talking about us producing, being more self-reliant in terms of production of food products in supply chains. I firmly believe that this needs to be a bit of a wake-up call for all of us.

Maximillian Alvarez:  It’s pretty wild to be having this conversation while an unelected oligarch and the richest man in the world and his technofascist Silicon Valley broligarchs who are cheering it all on are storming my government an hour away. But what we’re trying to do on these streams is channel our focus. Our focus is a form of resistance. As we said, if we’re all frenetically responding to the endless bad news that’s coming, we can’t stay focused on a given thing. And so of course we are focusing today on Trump’s trade war, the tariffs, the relationship between the US and Canada. But we can’t ignore the fact that that conversation is happening in a context where the corporate-led coup is happening as we speak. So we’re trying to balance those two things, of course. But yeah, I really appreciate you underlying that point.

Samira Mohyeddin:  I’m only saying that because I keep thinking of what Andrea said about the global implications of this beyond Canada and the US. She brought up USAID, for instance. It’s not just Trump. You saw Marco Rubio today, Elon Musk yesterday saying they’re thieves. This is very dangerous, and this is how fascism starts. These little trickles keep coming at you until [they’re] a massive wave and you don’t even know what to focus on because there’s so much coming at you all the time.

Maximillian Alvarez:  And with all that, it’s even easier to lose, again, the context we need to understand any given subject like the tariffs here. And so in that vein, are there more points here that folks watching in the US need to understand about the rise of Poilievre, the rightward turn, and the key political issues in Canada right now that we should get out on the table before we dig into the deal that was struck this week?

Desmond Cole:  Well, can I try a couple of things, maybe, in terms of myth busting. Trump has been saying repeatedly that there is all of this fentanyl, particularly, flowing from Canada into the United States. The numbers that we have here in Canada is that between 2023, October, and September, 2024, the United States seized 19-and-a-half kilograms of fentanyl coming across the border from Canada. Fentanyl, we know, is one of the most potent drugs out there, so 19-and-a-half kilograms of fentanyl can certainly do a lot of damage, but I could fit 19-and-a-half kilos of fentanyl on the desk that I’m sitting in front of.

If you compare that with Mexico, US border agents seized about nine-and-a-half thousand kilograms of fentanyl from the Mexico-US border. I don’t think I could fit that on this desk — And that’s not to scapegoat Mexico, by the way, because most of the drugs coming in the United States are coming through ports and places that are just normal business areas. They’re coming on planes. The idea that this is just a strictly border issue is a complete fabrication of Trump. He has also —

Maximillian Alvarez:  And smuggled in by Americans [laughs].

Desmond Cole:  Sure, of course.

But Trump also says there’s all these people pouring into the United States. He loves the specter of so-called, as he wants to say, illegal people. I reject that term out of hand. We’re talking a lot about goods being able to move across borders. People ought to be able to move across borders freely as well. But again, it’s just a myth that there are all of these people entering the United States from Canada without any kind of permissions or visas or supervision.

What’s actually happening, and has been happening throughout the Trump administration for a long time, but particularly during Trump, is that when he does these anti-immigrant fearmongerings, when he says he’s going to get ICE to deport 20 million people, they actually come to Canada, they come to our country. It’s the opposite of what he’s saying. So that’s another maybe important thing for an American audience to know. And again, I’m not saying that because I want to demonize anyone crossing any borders. I’m just trying to tell people what the facts of the real conversation here are.

And maybe a final thing for people to think about is this idea of trade between two countries. Trump says that there’s a huge trade deficit between Canada and the United States, meaning that services and goods go across the border both ways, as Samira was saying. But basically, the United States exports more goods to us in Canada than it receives back the other way. And for Trump, that’s a huge problem.

Like… Sorry, I’m sorry, I’m getting it backwards already, see, because I’m not an economist, the trade deficit is — I had to even write notes because it’s not like I talk about this stuff every day — But basically there’s an imbalance in how much the united exports to Canada versus how much it imports, and Trump thinks that that’s really bad. The only thing is when you buy goods from another country, you get the goods. It’s a trade. That’s the whole idea. So this idea that Canada is somehow screwing over the United States, or I think in the clip that you played, Max, that we’re being subsidized — No, that’s called business. I don’t have a trade deficit with the grocery store because when I go to the grocery store, they feed me and I have food in my house.

But again, to this narcissist called Trump, as long as someone else is getting an equal, fair exchange, it’s a ripoff. America should get all the benefits, every benefit should come to America and no benefits should go to anyone else. Everyone should buy America’s goods, but no one should receive any benefits back the other way.

So I think it’s important for people to understand trade not as some zero-sum thing the way that Trump is trying to paint it. But this is the largest, actually, trading partnership in the world. And the idea of doing these punitive tariffs, Europe and the European Union is essentially founded, in part, on the premise that this destroys countries. This makes countries want to go to war with each other. This makes it so much more likely that there’s going to be political strife and instability. So when you start fucking around with tariffs and trade, you’re making other kinds of problems and conflicts — Between your allies, by the way — Far more likely.

Maximillian Alvarez:  I’ve got two more clarifying points I want to throw in there, building off what Desmond said. And then Andrea, I want to come to you after that and ask if we could talk a bit more about how this is already reshaping the political landscape in Canada as we head into the federal elections later this year. But two other —

Andrea Houston:  I was just going to jump in on something that both of them were talking about with regard to trade and that these are just taxes. And it’s actually something that the left in Canada, at least, many, many years ago, back when the trade deals were first being crafted, the left in Canada was talking about imposing tariffs on many of these American companies back then. And maybe we would be in a different scenario today if, say, American tech companies had tariffs or taxes imposed on them when they were first rising up. Maybe journalism wouldn’t be on the chopping block the way it is currently. There’s a lot of industries, oil and gas immediately comes to mind, that we’re not taxing them nearly enough — In fact, we give them money, we give them subsidies. We give them billions of dollars in subsidies.

So I think you’d find a lot of people on the left in Canada, and probably in the US as well, would be very much in favor of dramatically raising the taxes and tariffs on some of these industries, lumber and all these other things that we do trade as countries, the more harmful industries.

I just want to make sure that that was put out there, and especially with the Online News Act here in Canada, there’s a lot that’s pro-tariffs that we could be doing that we can’t talk about right now because we’re inundated with terrible Trump news.

Maximillian Alvarez:  And let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Tariffs are a commonly used tool. It could be used for many purposes. The United Auto Workers Union president, Shawn Fain, just came out with a statement this week saying that the UAW is in favor of tariffs that are going to help the auto manufacturing industry. They’re not blanket bad or blanket good one way or the other. But Fain did also say that he explicitly rejects workers in America being used as political ploys in this trade war to demonize immigrants and further Trump’s anti-immigrant, fascist agenda.

So there is more nuance here than what we’re getting in a lot of the news reports, and certainly from them what we’re getting from the White House. So we want to be clear about that too, building off what Andrea was saying.

And we also gotta be clear about one other thing when it comes to tariffs here, because the tariffs are not just Trump’s method of diplomatic strong-arming. They are, in fact, a key policy that makes the rest of his project work, going all the way back to his previous administration.

Let’s not forget that the singular achievement, the biggest achievement from the first Trump administration, was a giant tax cut in 2017 that the Congressional Budget Office estimated, at the time, would cost $1.9 trillion over 10 years. Trump has already vowed to make the 2017 cuts permanent, and to even add on more tax cuts in his new term.

These are tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefit the rich and corporations. These are tax cuts that are coming on top of the Bush era tax cuts from 20 years ago. All of this is eroding the tax base that pays for the shit that our government needs or that it is spending money on. And we gotta make up for that loss somehow, especially as the Trump administration, like the Biden administration before that, keeps shelling out money to the military-industrial complex. Trump wants to build his border walls, mobilize law enforcement. All of that costs money, and tariffs are one of Trump’s main answers to the problem of where do we get the money when we’ve been cutting all the taxes of the rich and eroding the American tax base for so long?

That’s where you and I come in. As we’ve said, consumers, people in these countries, working people like you and me, are going to feel the brunt of these tariffs, especially if they’re not offset with increased manufacturing and all that stuff. So if and when those costs are passed on to you and me, it’s not just that we are the ones who are being hurt by the trade war, it’s that the pain that we are feeling in our wallets is paying for these goddamn tax breaks for the rich. That is also another thing to talk about here when we’re talking about tariffs and who they’re actually hurting. That needs to be understood before we move forward.

And also, as Desmond pointed out, and Samira did as well, there is a distraction element here, and Trump already signaled that. He claims that these tariff threats were to fight illegal immigration and the flow of fentanyl. And then on Monday when he struck this deal with Sheinbaum and Trudeau, immediately said that we’re going to pause for 30 days until we have this new economic plan with Canada. So it wasn’t about immigrants, and it wasn’t about fentanyl, or it wasn’t just about those, it’s about restructuring the relationship between these countries.

And that may help explain Trump’s childish, joking but deadly serious lines about Canada should become the 51st state. I recognize this line, as I’m sure you guys do, having grown up in the same generation. Let’s not forget, as I’ve said on this stream, I grew up deeply conservative. My conservative friends and I in the early aughts loved punching Canada as the 51st state or America’s hat. These tired, old, conservative jokes are constantly recycled through Trump’s mouth.

And so there is an element there that I think we also need to pay attention to. When Trump makes these proclamations and invokes that outdated bullyish humor, what he is trying to do is, basically, take school-yard dick measuring bully stuff and scale it up to the level of international diplomacy because that’s what he wants out of Canada, for Canada to become the subservient sidekick, held under America’s arm and getting a noogie and giving us whatever we want. And that’s what he needs the relationship between Canada and the US to be for so much of his other policy goals to actually work.

So like Samira said, Canada’s not actually going to become the 51st state, but in invoking that line, Trump is doing this schoolyard bully politics that is going to have real long-term implications that are going to not just affect Canadians and Americans, but are going to ripple across the world.

OK. So with all of that, I want to turn to what this is going to mean for Canada and Canadians in the coming months. We’ve already addressed the fact that this is hitting a bombshell in an already tumultuous time in Canada. I wanted to ask if we could dig into that a little bit more.

And Andrea, I want to come to you, and then Samira, then Desmond. But yeah, guys, give us a little more, tell us a little more about who Pierre Poilievre is, what these elections represent, how the new Trump administration is changing the political dynamic in your country.

Andrea Houston:  Pierre Poilievre is somebody that is a type of leader that Canadians are not used to. This is not a traditional Canadian political leader. He could be described as the most online political leader that we’ve ever seen in how he conducts himself, how he runs his campaign. It is very American to a lot of Canadians.

And with regard to Poilievre and his rise in Canada, again, you can point to our history as the roadmap for this, very similarly to how we can point to American history as the roadmap for Trump. While Canada has certainly done more to look back on our history and the road to reconciliation — We have a truth and reconciliation process that we have gone through, but it’s barely scratched the surface. And there’s a reason why it’s called truth and reconciliation, not truth, reconciliation and accountability.

Many people in Canada, myself included, and people in my circles, I put the blame for where we are right now on the shoulders of both Liberals and NDP — In many ways especially the NDP — For not responding to the moment and not standing up to Poilievre in ways that would have maybe been a clear resistance to this onslaught.

I’m talking back when he first started to really rise up as the leader. Around the trucker protests, there were moments when we could have had a different outcome to the road that we’re currently on. The NDP had numerous opportunities to swing extremely left, doing the kind of policy initiatives that Desmond talked about with housing and climate and populist policies that would’ve really launched a challenge to Poilievre and the populism that he has put forward that is clearly popular in Canada. Especially out West, this loyalty to oil and gas, connecting the oil and gas industry to Canadian patriotism and the dominionism that we do see coming out of the histories of colonialism and white supremacy, it’s all connected.

When you study these systems, it’s not surprising where we are right now in both of our countries. Both countries have undemocratic voting systems and our leaders have done everything to maintain that status quo. Even in Canada, when we had a few elections ago, the Liberals ran on changing the voting system. That was the main point of 2015’s election, saying this will be the last run on first past the post. First thing they did when they were elected is they reversed that policy, like, nope, we’re not going to do that after all. As soon as they figured out that if they did change the voting system, then it would ensure that it wasn’t just a Liberal and Conservative, likely majority, government in power. So all of these moments of opportunism, these missed opportunities from the left have all played into this.

And then, of course, this fragmenting of the left, the populace, has also played into this. We don’t have a solid anti-war movement to stand up against Trump. Where’s the media to really highlight the left in Canada? I don’t think I’ve ever seen really left-wing perspectives on our mainstream media. So we have only ourselves to blame for creating an environment that is fertile for a far-right extremist like Pierre Poilievre.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Samira, Desmond, anything you want to add to that before we talk about what comes next?

Samira Mohyeddin:  Pierre Poilievre is a man for these times, and I firmly agree with Andrea that we created this monster, because I don’t think people responded to him the way they should have. He has really become a figure, he’s almost like the little brother that Trump wouldn’t let in the room when they were growing up together.

Pierre Poilievre recently did this interview with Jordan Peterson, and I think it was like 12 hours long [Cole laughs]. I couldn’t sit through the entire thing. But it was all about wokeism and DEI. And these are the same things that you’re hearing in the US across the administration right now in the United States: Wokeism is the enemy; Diversity, equity, inclusion are the reasons why planes are going down. This is what we’re actually seeing replicated in our country. And a lot of the politicians who know that it’s wrong — And I’m speaking about the Liberals and the NDP — Are not pushing back on it the way they should be.

I know that a lot of the things that Pierre Poilievre says are ridiculous, but they’re also dangerous because they’re not being taken seriously. It’s unfortunate because, in a lot of ways, I like to think that Canada is better than that, but we end up just replicating what our neighbors to the south are doing politically, unfortunately.

Because you have figures — And I don’t know if we’re going to touch on this, but I think it’s really important that Gaza, Palestine, what’s happening over there has really influenced and affected our politics here. A lot of our politicians here in Canada are using what is happening in Gaza as a platform for themselves to try and garner support in the federal election that is coming up. And a lot of them are making some big mistakes in the way they’re responding.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Well, yeah, say a little more about how.

Samira Mohyeddin:  You’re seeing people, like we have a member of parliament here named Kevin Vuong who runs as an independent in the federal politics. He has really made this his thing. He even traveled to Israel, and we had a whole bunch of our politicians, our prime minister didn’t go, but a whole bunch of these low-level politicians going over to Israel and then chirping all over social media about this person is an antisemite or that person is an antisemite, and they’re getting a lot of support from communities because of that.

And we’re not seeing our more left-leaning like the NDP party rising up and speaking out against this in the way that they really should be. They are not responding in the way that they should be.

You’re hearing people, say, for instance, recently the reaction to Trump saying that we’re going to own Gaza and we’re going to make a Riviera of the Middle East there, et cetera. Poilievre, for instance, didn’t even respond to it. He had nothing to say, but the Liberals came out and said, we believe in a two-state solution. How can you say you believe in a two-state solution when you don’t even recognize, officially, the other state, meaning Palestine? Canada voted at the United Nations to not recognize it. It didn’t recognize Palestine as a state. So how can you say you believe in a two-state solution when you don’t even recognize one of the states that you say that you believe there’s a solution to?

And the NDP [leader] Jagmeet Singh did come out and say that this is a preposterous thing that Trump is saying. But why are we only reacting when Trump says something? The same NDP is not allowing their member of provincial parliament, Sarah Jama, to come back into the fold.

So there’s a lot of talking out both sides of their mouths here. And I don’t think people are taking what is happening seriously, because a lot of people on the Progressive Conservative side are winning ridings because of their responses to what is happening in Gaza.

Maximillian Alvarez:  I want to hover on this point for a second. It reveals a lot for the larger conversation that we’re having here. And we’ve got another 30, 40 minutes here on the stream, so I want to zero in on this. Because, as you all have said, there are so many mirror reflections of the political reality in the US that are being reflected in Canada. But there are also many ways in which Canada is not the United States, and so many times, especially here in the US, we just assume what’s happening here and the conditions that we have here are the same as they are up there, and that is not always the case.

For example, the latest statistics just came out showing that the United States is now in single-digit union density numbers, meaning that less than 10% of workers across this country are in a union. Canada has around 30%, which is where we used to be at our height back in the ’50s and early ’60s. So you can’t just talk about the labor movement in the US and Canada as if they’re the same thing.

So the point I’m trying to make here is that when it comes to the role of Gaza, Israel and its genocidal US- and Canada-supported war on Gaza, and the right of Palestinians to exist, I wanted to ask in terms of how that is shaping the political scene in Canada. What factors are the same? Is Israel’s lobbying influence relatively similar in Canada as it is here in the United States? Is the crackdown from universities to the media on pro-Palestinian, antigenocide voices following the same playbook? Is the involvement of big tech — You guys have had Facebook intervening in your news feeds in a way that we haven’t in the past couple years. So I just wanted to, through the question of Gaza, try to answer some of those other questions about how circumstances in Canada are very similar to what they are here, and also how they are not.

Samira Mohyeddin:  In terms of the university campuses, it’s identical. We haven’t gotten to the place where we’re speaking about Zionism as a protected class of people. I think NYU and Harvard both now are seeing Zionists as a protected class like any other race, gender. So we have a political ideology being protected, and that is unheard of. We haven’t done that here yet. However, I can tell you that there are numerous professors, numerous students who have been chided for speaking out against genocide, deans, provosts bringing people in. And the students who were in the University of Toronto encampment were actually taken to court. They were part of an injunction that the university got to have the encampment disbanded.

So we don’t have things here like APAC, but we certainly have CIJA, the Center for Israel and Jewish Affairs. They may not be doling out the same amount of money that politicians in the US get, but they’re still getting free trips to Israel, and they’re still getting some funding. So it’s like a little baby replication. We just don’t have that type of funding. But we haven’t gone there yet. The UFT has not adopted IRA, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, which conflates antisemitism with critiques of Israel, but we certainly had our Canadian Broadcasting Corporation use that term, use that definition when they recently gave a workshop to their journalists. So these things are happening here, just not on such a grand scale.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Desmond, what about you, man? I see you shaking over there. You got a lot to say. It doesn’t have to necessarily be about Gaza, but yeah, hop in here. Are there other aspects that are similar or distinctly different that you want to highlight, or other areas in which this is reshaping the political map in Canada that you want folks to pay attention to?

Andrea Houston:  Sorry, is that for me?

Maximillian Alvarez:  So I was tossing it to Desmond, just because I feel like I skipped Desmond by accident.

Desmond Cole:  No, no, no. That’s OK. I mean, it’s public, so I might as well say it on this stream. I’m one of, I believe just over 100 people in the city of Toronto, anyway, who have been arrested, and I’m still facing charges because I participated in a Palestine solidarity demonstration last January. We are being treated for these acts as though we are not just allegedly breaking the laws of Canada, but that we are also doing something specifically harmful to the Jewish communities in Canada. That’s the allegation.

And I say that specifically because there’s been a lot of conflation, as Samira said, with this idea that if you speak out for Palestinian life and liberation in this moment, it’s because you are an antisemite, because you want something specifically bad to happen, not even around Israel, but to Jews all over the world wherever they happen to be, including in Canada. An absurd claim.

So I’ve been caught up in that. I’ve been reporting on other people who have been caught up on it. Samira has been doing some of the best work in this country around that, and we salute that.

It’s been a really awful climate. Canada’s been an enabler of the United States and of Israel. Canada’s sent weapons to Israel in the last 15 months, but the partnership is decades old. Canada’s policy towards Israel and Israeli aggression inside of Gaza and Palestine, they align pretty, I think, directly. Israel makes the decisions about what’s going to happen in that region and its allies, Canada, United States, Germany, France, Great Britain, they say, what do you need? How can we help you? To the detriment of the Palestinian people.

It’s a little different here, I think, because the Muslim population, the Arab population — Not so much the specifically Palestinian, but the Muslim and Arab population in this country has a fair amount of influence, a growing, I would say, amount of influence in Canada, has people elected in government, has large organizations that have a voice, and is part of a lot of conversations that can put a lot of pressure on the government.

And I think Canada has tried to tread a little more carefully than Joe Biden did in the United States during his time. Canada has tried to portray itself as being more even-handed, even signaling towards the formal end of this conflict, that maybe it was going to start withholding some weapons in some circumstances, that maybe it was going to change its votes at the UN in some circumstances in order to signal to people that it was getting frustrated with Israel’s ongoing siege. But for the most part, I think those things have been similar between the two countries.

I actually wanted to go back to this idea of the trade and the things like this because we were talking about Pierre Poilievre, the leader of the federal Conservative Party.

So he just recently came out this week with a statement about what he wants to do with fentanyl. He’s trying to appear as though he’s taking Trump’s fake claims about fentanyl very seriously and that he’s going to do something about it if he’s elected prime minister of Canada. So now he has a proposal that says if he becomes prime minister, he’s going to propose a legal change that if you’re caught selling 20 to 40 milligrams of fentanyl, you’ll automatically receive a 15-year sentence — So we are reviving the war on drugs that has existed in this country for decades that we’ve been trying to fight so hard to get rid of — And then he says, if you have 40 milligrams or above, then you get an automatic life sentence. This is his proposal to try and demonstrate how tough he is.

And I bring that up because I want to demonstrate that there are consequences for how people say that they’re going to pursue remedies to this trade war between the United States and Canada that are going to have really, really bad, harmful outcomes. This policy by Poilievre, he’s so stupid. He claims that that policy is to target who he calls “drug kingpins” — A kingpin carrying 20 milligrams of fentanyl. That’s somebody who’s probably got that amount of drugs to feed a habit, to sell a little bit to some people around them and to have some for themselves. That’s what 20 milligrams is. It’s not a kingpin of drugs.

But because of the specter raised by Trump and because conservative forces in this country want to be seen to respond to that, now we have a renewed front on the war on drugs when we should be going the complete opposite direction. So I just want to say that to talk about some of the impacts that it has domestically on us to have to deal with these things.

Maximillian Alvarez:  I really, really appreciate those points. And I do, in this last half hour, really want to channel our focus on what this is all going to mean for working people, regular people who are trying to get by in a world that is making it increasingly hard for us to do so, and now we got all this shit piling on top of us.

But for your average viewer, I want us to talk about what we’re facing and how we actually see our fates as necessarily intertwined. And whatever we do to resist this and get out of it is going to need to be done with a cross-border sense of solidarity that allows us to see beyond our own domestic sphere.

So I want us to talk about that in this last half hour. But by way of getting us there, Andrea, I did want to toss it back to you in case you had any other thoughts about how this week’s bombshell is reshaping the political map, how we got the current political map in Canada that we got — Why is Poilievre ascending and so popular? What explains this right-wing drift that maybe we haven’t covered yet? Anything like that that you wanted to get on the table too?

Andrea Houston:  Well, the short answer is white supremacy [laughs]. That is the short answer. Oil and gas, I think, is a big part of this. I think that it binds both of our countries, and we can see that in the groups that have been at the forefront of the Project 2025 document, the Heritage Foundation and the Atlas Foundation, and a lot of these far-right groups that are, some of them started in Canada, some of them started in the US, but they definitely work in both countries, and they’re very much interconnected in the lobbying efforts that they do. So I really think that we have to follow the money like good journalists do, and we follow that money through the groups that are advocating and lobbying and pushing for these wild policies, these crazy policies.

I mentioned American exceptionalism before, but there’s also Canadian exceptionalism. This idea that we as North American white people have more claim to the land, more claim to policy, more claim to direct how things should happen around the world, where the money should flow and who should benefit. And I think that when we really name this, this is not just an American problem, this is a Canadian problem. And again, it’s how both of our intertwined histories have really played out.

I actually do think that Canada could become the 51st state. I actually do think that there is a real possibility that Canada could be annexed. I think our resources, particularly our water and our oil and gas and natural minerals, the minerals that power the EVs and phones and all that other stuff, the green transition, as it’s like to be sold to us, I think, is extremely appealing. Whether Trump is smart enough to understand the wealth that he can glean from Canada, the people who surround him most certainly do.

And I think that that is a plan for him. Whether he knows how to strategically execute that plan, I don’t know. But I do think that that is absolutely on the table is something that could happen, and I don’t know what Canada could really do to stop it, to be honest with you.

Samira Mohyeddin:  — Burn down the White House, we’ll burn down the White House again [laughs].

Maximillian Alvarez:  But that is, I think, a really crucial point. Because we are in a new era. Whatever it is, we know it’s not the old one. This is not neoliberalism, this is something new. This is a 21st century where the inviolable discourse that we grew up with is very violable right now, by which I mean the very concept of national sovereignty and a country’s right to exist and not be invaded. We grew up believing that, yeah, we don’t do that anymore. But here we are in 2025, Trump’s talking about taking Greenland, taking back the Panama Canal, annexing Canada as the 51st state.

Now, of course, the tragic, comic irony of all this is that Indigenous people here in North America will remind us, like people in the Global South around the world will remind us that we have been violating other countries’ national sovereignty and right to exist in perpetuity. That is what we have been doing through our imperial exploits for decades.

But that also helps explain what’s happening now because folks watching may have heard the refrain that the empire is coming home. It always comes back. And that is, in many ways, what’s so shocking to people right now. We could, 20 years ago, be perfectly fine with compromising and violating the national sovereignty of a country like Iraq, but now when we’re talking about doing it to Canada, suddenly everybody is spooked because it’s so close to home.

But to Andrea’s point, I think it really does behoove us to consider this as not just Trumpian bluster and not just sound and fury — Though it is a lot of that too — But when Trump says he wants to take Greenland, it’s not for nothing. It’s because Greenland has all the goddamn minerals that we want and want to take for our economic future as green technologies become in higher demand, to say nothing of the shipping routes and the military strategic positioning of Greenland as climate change gets worse and as the ice melts and opens up new routes that we want to have control over.

So there is a logic underlying these ridiculous claims about Trump wanting to take Greenland, or even Trump wanting to take Canada, whose biggest export is crude oil, right?

Desmond Cole:  Can I say something though? Because yeah, maybe there’s a certain logic there, but these are allied countries. These are countries that, as Trudeau was trying to remind everyone the other day, have gone to war together and have died alongside each other. These are countries who are part of the Five Eyes. These are countries that are part of NATO. The idea that Canada is the number one threat or conquest in the eyes of the United States right now is pretty fucking stupid, I’m sorry.

At the end of it, we’re not the target. We’re being played with like so many other countries are being played with because I think that there’s a certain strategic chaos that Trump is trying to sow, as has already been said here, because it also helps him domestically. Looking like he’s beating up on all these other countries helps him look strong at home, and it distracts from things that are happening at home. It’s very convenient for him to do that. We just can’t formulate a politics about worrying about whether or not we’re going to be annexed.

Why would you annex your partner when they’re having such nice… Trump was the one that negotiated the USMCA trade agreement just five years ago with Trudeau and with Mexico. The idea that he’s not getting everything that he needs, or that country isn’t, or that they’re going to upend everything. We have to remember some of these things.

When Trump says, I’m going to put troops in Gaza, does the United States actually want to send people there? Does the man who campaigned on saying that all the wars were going to end and all of this nation building was going to stop? Is he really going to be able to turn on a dime and convince people, actually, we just have to start putting boots on the ground in all these other parts of the world? We’re going to be following this little toy on a string for the entire four years if it goes like this. I do think we have to be somewhat careful.

And just to the other point that was being brought up before about leftist or leftish entities in Canada, like the New Democrat Party, the NDP — I’m guilty of what I’m about to say, so I’m speaking as much to myself as I am to anyone out there listening — But the only way that the NDP is ever going to accept a leftist agenda is if there’s essentially a socialist takeover of that party, or if they collapse and there’s a new party that comes up in their place. That’s it. The people who run that party today don’t share the socialist values that maybe some of us do. They just don’t. And they’re not going to take socialist positions out of political opportunism.

I’m saying that knowing people like Sarah Jama, who’s been brought up in this conversation, who are formerly part of the NDP, who really believe this stuff, who are actually trying to shift politics in a more socialist, egalitarian direction. Those people are the minority. And the reason that I still orient a lot of my thinking towards the NDP is I know that there’s people like that in there, and it’s like y’all are trapped because you’re in an entity that wants to bring you along for the ride but is not about to move to the left.

And so when I say this, I’m thinking for Canada, and I’m thinking for Americans who had some hope in Bernie Sanders a little while back and who’ve been looking to the Democrats and being really disappointed that the Democrats don’t stand up to Republicans. We have to stop asking political entities that don’t explicitly have a socialist or leftist agenda to do so out of pragmatism. It’s just not going to happen.

Maximillian Alvarez:  I think that’s really, really clearly and powerfully put, brother. I think something that we all need to sit with, and something that folks here in the States are trying to work through too.

Because when we say the left, I don’t know who that means here or what that means. I think a lot of folks are waking up to the reality that we and others have been warning about for years, which is, if Trump comes back, or even if Harris wins and the Democrats prove that they can win without the Bernie wing of the party, then where does the left live? What is the left? Are these terms even useful anymore in the world that we’re living in? That’s a subject for another livestream. But these are the questions that we are asking ourselves right now.

But more than that, and again, sticking with the theme here, we’ve got to be looking and thinking and acting bigger. There is no sizable left in the United States to mobilize that, even if it was mobilized around a united front back in the ’40s, could take on the raid forces that are taking over the government right now. It does not exist.

And so if you want to fight this, and if you want a world that is different from the one we’re careening towards, you need to stop trying to organize the left. You need to start trying to organize the working class. You need to get out there and talk to your neighbors, workers, union, non-union, anyone and everyone that you can to bring us around a shared basis of fact-based reality, like basic human rights and principles, the most essential shit that actually unites us.

But as far as what that means on the institutional left in this country, again, even if we have an answer to that, it’s a combination of DSA, nonprofits, community orgs, all of which are doing invaluable work, but none of which actually have the size and capacity to be a robust bulwark against what’s happening right now. So I think we do need to really have some hard questions.

Samira Mohyeddin:  We need small acts from millions of people, and I firmly believe that that is what needs to happen. I’ll just give you an example, Max. We live in a country here in Canada that has a lot of monopolies in different sectors. So for instance, Desmond brought up the Weston family. This is a family here who owns multiple grocery chains, and they were involved in… What was that bread? [Crosstalk] They were fixing the price of bread?

Desmond Cole:  …Price fixing, yeah.

Samira Mohyeddin:  OK. That’s a reason to have a revolution if you’re in France. People in Canada need to understand the power that they have. There was a whole movement — The chain is called Loblaws — There was a whole movement to boycott Loblaws. Right now when these tariffs, they were talking about them, there is the Independent Grocers Federation here in Canada, 7,000 independent grocers. I firmly believe that people should just stop shopping at these big grocery stores and support the mom and pop shops on the corner. Trust me, their produce is amazing. They may not have certain things, but you don’t need that right now. I really think that people need to start doing these small acts of being more conscious of where they spend their money, what they do with it, and who they’re giving it to. It makes a difference.

BDS — And I’ll bring this back to Gaza again — BDS makes a difference. Companies like Starbucks and McDonald’s are hurting right now, and they have been upfront that it’s hurting them. So I think people need to realize the power of their own pockets.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Well, I think that’s a great lead-in to this final turn around, the table. I wanted to ask, A, we did pose the question about the deal that was struck between Canada and the US this week, and it feels like there’s a lot of sound and fury there. There are some additional resources being committed, but a lot of the details of this new economic plan between Canada and the US have yet to be seen. We’re going to find out in the coming weeks.

But I think one of the key questions that’s come out of this discussion is what other concessions will Trump be able to extract out of Canada and Mexico to align them with his own policy priorities to avoid these tariff threats in the future? And so that’s a question that we all need to be asking ourselves moving forward. So if any of you have something to say on that, this last turn would be our time to do it.

But also the soul of the question I wanted to ask, given that we’re all in the media, we all work in independent media, we are all trying to report on the stuff that matters, and we all believe that people with good information are the stewards of democracy. They’re the ones that we’re trying to inform so that they can safeguard the society that we’re trying to build here and take care of themselves and all that good stuff.

Point being is that as media makers, as people in North America facing this shit, and as people who live in countries that so much of what happens in the coming years here in the United States is going to depend on how Canada and the US respond to it and vice versa. So with all that in mind, how do we get ourselves, everyone watching right now, the folks that we do journalism for, how do we get people to see our fates as intertwined and to see these domestic issues through an international lens, and what opportunities does that give us to resist what’s coming?

So there’s a lot there. Please take whichever question you want. Don’t answer all of them, but anything you guys want to say in this final round. Samira, I’ll start again with you, and then Andrea, then Desmond, close us out.

Samira Mohyeddin:  I’m talking too much. Start with Andrea [laughs].

Maximillian Alvarez:  All right, Andrea, we’ll start with you.

Andrea Houston:  OK. I think the left has to start with a new baseline. I think we need to recalibrate what it means to be on the left — Problematic with that term as it is, obviously. But I think the baseline for any movement going forward, for us to collaborate and come together, cross borders, but also globally, we have to agree on democracy and human rights as a baseline, and that has to also be an anticapitalist analysis.

The problem with, as Des was talking about with the NDP and has been a concern for the left in both of our countries, is that the left isn’t anticapitalist. The Democrats in your country are not anticapitalist. They’re very much very pro-capitalist, which is breeding all of these issues.

We can’t all agree on something. Whether we’re talking about Gaza, whether we’re talking about housing, whether we’re talking about corporations and corporate tax rates, whether we’re talking about any of these issues, climate change, the fundamental facts of climate change, we can’t agree on because of capitalism. We have to make concessions to corporations. We have to create these kangaroo courts that corporations can go to and say, well, these climate activists are cutting into my profits, and therefore they can take activists to court. Activists are going to jail because they’re standing up for human dignity, for the possibility of future generations to have a future. God forbid.

I think we need to recalibrate, recalibrate what it means to be a left-wing person, what it means to support democracy and human rights. We’re living in not just tumultuous times politically, but tumultuous times in our world. I don’t have to tell anybody listening or anybody on this panel the reality of the climate crisis, but it’s so much worse than what we’ve been told. So much worse. We are living in a collapse, and I think we need to recalibrate how we talk about the climate crisis.

We are living in an era of collapse, and everything that we’re seeing, from the rise of dictators, from the shift to far-right politics all around the world, to the rise of antigay laws, an increase in antigay laws in places like Uganda, to everything that we’re seeing right now can really be traced back to we’re living through an era of collapse. Metacrisis is actually what it’s called by climate scientists. So a lot of what I’m seeing is filtered through this lens.

And I agree with Samira. Small acts, we need much more people to come out and do those small acts. Take to the streets, join us in protest, stand up locally, get to know your neighbors, mutual aid, all of those things. But we also need big acts. I’m reading How to Blow Up a Pipeline right now, and I know I’m late to the game, but I want big acts, I want to see people take big swings. I want people to really put their bodies on the line, their lives on the line. That’s what it’s going to take.

I wouldn’t ask anybody to put themselves in danger, but I think that we are going to all face that in our life at some point over the next five to 10 years. Whether we actually see the collapse of our democracy, I think that’s possible. I think that’s on the table. Whether we’re seeing collapses of economies all around the world, we’ve already seen that. More displaced people, more refugees, more economies in disarray.

And so it’s really important that we recalibrate how we talk about these issues, and we stop being a slave to capitalism, and we stand up and say unapologetically what this means and what is coming down the pipe. Don’t be afraid to be that annoying person at parties. I know I have been for many, many years, so I think it’s totally fine. But I do think that building the big tent of workers of different movements, LGBTQ people, women, civil rights movements all around the world, we all have to come together under a uniform to help humanity and human rights and democracy. That has to be the baseline.

Samira Mohyeddin:  And not be cynical about those two words too, because we’ve allowed the right to take those two words and ruin them where you see human… The entire rules-based order and all of these things. I mean, the West went and died in Gaza. So these terms that we’re using, we have to breed life into them again because they’ve been killed in such an abhorrent way. And I’m all for big acts, big acts, but I’m just one person.

What I can say though, before I let Desmond come in here, is to support your independent local media, support the people who are talking about these things, who are covering these things. You have to pay for journalism. It’s not free. We do this work. It’s exhausting. Sometimes there’s only one or two of us. It may look like there’s a lot of us on a team, but sometimes there’s only one or two people, and we’re trying to bring these stories to you. They’re important. And when we do, don’t call us alarmist. Shit’s crumbling, and we’re just sounding the alarm. So don’t shoot the messenger.

Desmond Cole:  A couple of things. So when it comes to what’s going to happen now with the relationship between the two countries, I don’t want to make too much of a big prediction here, but I do feel like Trump has played a lot of his hand when it comes to Canada and the United States. I don’t think he’s going to be dangling the tariffs Sword of Damocles over our heads every month for the next 18 months or something. He went for it. He got some disruption. He got some really weak concessions — Because remember, Trudeau already said he was going to do a bunch of things at the border before this threat, and when he announced the fentanyl czar and all these things, he just re-announced all the things that he had already promised he was going to do.

So I don’t know that Canada’s going to be reaching back into the bag to find all of these new concessions for Trump going forward. I think he’s gotten a lot of what he’s going to get already. Like I said, I don’t think harassing Canada for the next four years is his plan. This is good for him for now. He’s getting what he needs right now. We’re in week four of this man’s administration — I don’t even think we’re four weeks in. It’s just felt that way. So I think we’ve seen a lot of what we’re going to see on this, and things will hopefully start to recalibrate.

I do agree with Samira that there are opportunities now, that this conversation has sparked a weird kind of nationalism. It takes a lot to get Canadians fired up about living in their own country, but somehow this conversation has managed to do that. And if we’re able to take that energy… The Breach just had an interesting podcast conversation last week with Stuart Trew, who’s at the Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives, and he was talking about [how] this really feels like Green New Deal conversations again, where we’re looking at, for example, we say Canada’s not for sale, and then we say, please buy our oil. Please keep buying our oil. Don’t mess with oil. You know what I mean? It’s very, very silly.

But if we weren’t so oil reliant as a country between our relationship with Canada and the United States, that might make us a little secure in the future, that this wouldn’t be able to happen again in the same way, we wouldn’t be able to be threatened again. So there are opportunities to do things like that.

There are opportunities not simply to buy local — And by the way, there was this really funny list out there telling people to go and for example, don’t shop at Starbucks because it’s American, shop at Tim Horton’s, a good Canadian brand, which has been owned by a Brazilian company for several years now [Alvarez laughs], right? So we gotta brush up on our nationalism because there’s a lot of phony shit going on out there right now. People don’t actually know as individuals what to do. Nor should they, because it’s not your individual responsibility to stop Trump and tariffs.

But you might want to try and use this opportunity to start thinking about how do we support people to have decent jobs in Canada, not just buy some products that have a Canadian flag on them, but actually support better labor in this country? Because what corporate interests want to do in this moment is they want to be like, you know how we should fight back against these tariffs? We should lower taxes. We should get rid of all of the regulations. We should do all of the things that the corporate agenda always wants us to do, and that’ll help.

But I think we need to actually be pushing backwards in the other direction and being like, wouldn’t it be great if Canada was a place where we were providing better jobs? Wouldn’t it be great, with all of these threats of deporting people in the United States, if Canada was thinking how we could support people, how are we going to support queer people, particularly trans people, who are so under assault in the United States? A lot of them are going to try and leave America, and no one can blame them for doing that because of all of the legal crackdowns that are happening. I know people in this country who have been making plans before Trump got elected. How are we going to support trans people coming here and starting a new life because it’s not going to be safe for them to exist as themselves in the United States any [longer]?

These are things that we can do as we continue our work and try to continue taking advantage of this moment and what this moment is revealing to us about some of the problems of how we live.

But yes, I agree also with this idea that small acts can mean a lot. Working in our communities locally can mean a lot. It can mean a lot more than people sometimes give it credit for. We talk about a lot of big issues on conversations like this, and it might feel alienating to people, but there’s always something happening in your local community, whether that be around housing or rents that are really expensive to pay and tenant organizations getting together to support one another, or whether that be about local food issues. There’s always something happening in your neighborhood where you can begin or continue planting these seeds, meeting people, having conversations and organizing. So it’s not all bad news and it’s not all bleak, and we wouldn’t be able to continue doing this work if we didn’t have some hope that something could change in the future.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Hell yeah. I think that’s a beautiful point to end on. We are coming up on our time here. Before we wrap up formally, one more time, I really want to thank our incredible guests, Andrea Houston of Ricochet Media, Desmond Cole from The Breach, and Samira Mohyeddin of On The Line Media. And I want to personally urge all of y’all out there to please support their work and support their outlets because we need them now more than ever, but our work cannot continue without your support.

And that is certainly true for us here at The Real News as well. We need you to become a Real News member today. Your membership and your support directly translates to more journalism, more livestreams like this, more interviews with frontline workers and people brutalized by the police, Indigenous land defenders, more documentaries from Gaza, India, Canada, the US, and beyond. We’ve been publishing this stuff year after year, but we can’t keep doing it without you.

So don’t forget to subscribe to our channel. Hit the bell icon so you never miss one of our new reports. And remember, we do not get YouTube advertising money or accept corporate funds. Our survival depends on you. You keep us going, and together we can keep covering the stories that matter, the stories that others won’t cover.

As we close out today’s livestream, I got one more thing I want to say on the topic of independent media and the importance of journalism that still believes in truth and showing the truth and taking together everything that we’ve been talking about tonight and everything that’s going on around us right now.

These Trump trade wars, the mass deportations, the emboldened fascists and outright Nazis who are mobilizing online and offline right now, Trump’s horrifying and publicly stated plans for Gaza. These Musk-led technofascists and Silicon Valley broligarchs carrying out a coup on what’s left of our democracy, taking over and shutting down whole government offices, accessing and potentially exposing basically all of our sensitive data and our bank accounts. And when you add onto this the fracturing of the digital media ecosystem that we had when Trump was last elected eight years ago with top-down decisions from big tech about injecting AI slop and misinformation into our feeds, or removing news on Canadian Facebook feeds, with people fleeing platforms like X and Facebook that they feel are compromised, and with pages and accounts on those platforms getting banned left and right, and with all these pieces falling into place, setting up a free speech-smashing McCarthyist witch hunt on pro-Palestine antigenocide voices, protests, media outlets, nonprofits.

I honestly can’t tell you I know what’s going to happen in the coming months and years. None of us can. But I want to close with what I do know. After interviewing workers for years, I know and have seen the indelible truth upon which the entire labor movement is based, that none of us has the power to take on the bosses alone, but we do have the power to take them on together. As individual subjects, as individual media outlets, none of us can fight what’s happening and what’s coming on our own. We are simply outmatched and outgunned, and that is a fact.

And that is why every move these oligarchs make, every message they send through their right-wing propaganda machine is specifically designed to put us in the powerless position of atomized, isolated, angry, anxious, distrustful, and fearful individuals. They need working people to be divided for all of this to work. They need us to not give a shit about Canadian or Mexican workers so that we cheer on these tariffs that are going to hurt them and us. They need us to not give a shit about immigrants or to actively see them as our enemy for these fascist immigration raids to continue and these concentration camps to be constructed, all while the billionaires, bosses, corporations, tech firms, and Wall Street vampires are robbing us blind. They need us to not give a shit about union workers and the value that unions have for all of us so that we remain indifferent to the fact that Trump is doing corporate America’s bidding right now by smashing the National Labor Relations Board and effectively rendering most of labor law and workers’ rights null and void in this country.

You want to resist this? Start by resisting every urge that you have, every urge you’ve been conditioned to feel, resist every tempting command you get from people like Trump and Musk and Poilievre to see your fellow workers as your enemy. Canadian workers and their families, Mexican workers, Americans, immigrant workers, trans and queer workers, union and non-union workers, workers who live in red states and who live in blue states. They want us to focus on what makes us different so we don’t realize how much more we all have in common with each other than we do with fucking billionaires and zealots who are smashing everything and refashioning our government right now and our economy in order to keep empowering and enriching themselves at our expense.

But we need to do more than resist right now on the individual level. We need to build a real and durable infrastructure that will enable us to survive and resist long-term as a collective, an infrastructure that is welded together by solidarity and tangible commitment. We journalists and media makers across the US, Canada, and Mexico need to form a North American Free Press Alliance with the explicit goal of not only defending journalism, free speech, and the people’s right to the truth, but to create a common ground where working people across our countries can find informational stability, where we can find each other and work together on a shared plane of fact-based reality and commitment to basic-ass human rights.

We need to harness our existing tools and assets to build the infrastructure for a network that will connect us across borders, languages, and algorithmic echo chambers, provide collective protection against censorship, and provide working people in North America with news, stories, context, and analysis that helps us understand what’s happening in our own countries and across the continent through an internationalist lens and with an unwavering commitment to truth, class solidarity, and humanity, and a livable planet.

And that network must not and cannot be existentially dependent on these oligarch-controlled social media platforms. Doing this, I would argue, is not only necessary as an emergency measure to ensure our survival, but it is necessary for all of us to fulfill our duty to the public as journalists, and to carry out our missions as media-making outlets that exist to inform the public with the truth, and to empower people to be the change that they’re waiting for.

But we won’t do any of this if we just sit and wait. I know that much. I know that competition between journalists and media outlets right now will be a death sentence. Solidarity and collaboration will be our salvation, if we choose it. If we don’t stand together, if we just focus on protecting our individual organizations and our subscriber lists and followers, it will be that much easier to pick us off one by one. And for your own sake and for all of ours, don’t let them. Take action now. Get off the sidelines and get into the fight before it’s too late.

For The Real News Network and for the whole crew here who has made this livestream happen, this is Maximillian Alvarez signing off. Please take care of yourselves and take care of each other. Solidarity forever.

Thank you so much for watching The Real News Network, where we lift up the voices, stories and struggles that you care about most. And we need your help to keep doing this work. So please tap your screen now, subscribe, and donate to The Real News Network. Solidarity forever.

From the attempt to broadly freeze federal grants and loans to high-profile firings at the National Labor Relations Board, TRNN Reporter Mel Buer and Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez break down this week’s chaotic directives from the Trump administration and what they will mean for working people and the labor movement. Mel and Max also lay out what we know about the tragic collision of a US Army Black Hawk helicopter and American Airlines regional passenger jet, Trump’s broad attacks on federal workers, including air traffic controllers and members of the Aviation Security Advisory Committee, and how those attacks have been going on long before Trump. Then, from the historic union victory by Whole Foods workers in Philadelphia to Kaiser Healthcare workers on strike in California, we will highlight key labor stories taking place beyond the chaos in Washington, DC. 

Studio Production: David Hebden, Cameron Granadino, Adam Coley

Transcript

Maximillian Alvarez:  Welcome to The Real News Network, and welcome back to our weekly livestream.

All right. Week two of the new Trump administration has been a characteristically chaotic one. But make no mistake — While this all feels kind of familiar because we have the last Trump administration to compare it to, from the avalanche of executive orders and the baffling press conferences to the spectacle-filled Senate confirmation hearings, the past two weeks have brought us, undoubtedly, into historically unique and unfamiliar territory.

We can see that just by looking at this graph from Axios comparing the current administration’s pace and number of executive orders to those of past administrations — Including, I might add, the first Trump administration.

As Erin Davis notes, “In his first nine days in office, President Trump unleashed a flurry of executive orders unlike anything in modern presidential history. […] Trump’s reshaping the federal government with a shock-and-awe campaign of unilateral actions that push the limits of presidential power. Only President Biden and President Truman have issued more than 40 executive orders in their first 100 days in office. So far, Trump has signed 38 after less than two weeks.”

And the shock and awe effect is very real, and it’s very intentional. Faced with a barrage of executive orders and administrative shakeups, some that are purely theatrical BS, others that are deadly serious and could trigger full-on constitutional crises, from pulling the US out of the Paris Climate Agreement yet again, to declaring a national emergency at the Southern border, to pardoning the Jan. 6 insurrectionists. There’s just too much here to process at once. Our brains and our hearts get overwhelmed and we end up immobilized.

But our goal with these livestreams, and with all of our Real News productions, is to do the exact opposite. That’s why today my Real News teammate Mel Buer and I are going to focus in on a few key stories from this week that have direct implications for workers, our lives and safety, our rights in the workplace, and for the labor movement writ large. Mel and I are going to try to use our skills as reporters with long histories of covering labor, including on our weekly podcast, Working People, to answer your questions and give you the information, perspectives, and analysis that you need so that you can process this, you can get mobilized, and you can be empowered to act.

All right. So Mel, what are we digging into?

Mel Buer:  OK, so we’re starting with three pretty major headlines from this week. The first is going to be last night’s horrific plane crash in DC. It’s the deadliest on US soil in over 20 years, where 64 civilians and three military service members are dead. There’s a lot we don’t know, and new information is coming through at a pretty fast clip. So we’ll lay out what we do know and why that matters.

Then we’re going to get into the most pressing headlines coming out of the White House as it relates to Trump’s executive orders, namely the funding freeze fiasco and what that means for workers here in the US.

And then we’re going to talk about the recent shakeups at the NLRB: General Counsel Abruzzo’s firing and the abrupt termination of the NLRB chair, Gwynne Wilcox, and what that means for the future of labor organizing in this uncertain moment.

When you look at these stories together, they reveal a lot about how this administration sees government workers, contractors, and the working people around the country who depend on their services, how it’s approaching governance, using union busting and antiworker tactics from the private sector, and how explicitly targeting the agencies and precedents that exist to enforce labor law and protect workers’ rights has become a key issue for this administration.

Maximillian Alvarez:  All right, so let’s dig into the most pressing story that we’re all thinking about right now. Let’s talk about what we know and what we don’t know about this horrific plane crash. We are going live right now at 4:00 PM on Thursday. As I speak, President Donald Trump is holding another press conference, his second today. It’s a live briefing on an FAA debrief. So there’s going to be things said at that briefing that we can’t comment on now, but we will, of course, follow up on this story, and we’re going to try to give you as much of what we know now.

Let’s start with the basics. What do we know, what’s happening? The AP reports the basics here. A midair collision between an Army helicopter and an American Airlines flight that was coming from Kansas killed all 67 people on board the two aircraft. The reasons for this crash, the causes of it, are still under investigation. That is the official word. So we want to temper all of our collective expectations here and allow for the investigatory process to proceed so that we can get more information. Now, of course — We’ll comment on this in a minute — That hasn’t stopped many people in the government from opining and blaming and directing blame at what they perceive to be the causes of this horrific crash. We’re going to talk about those in a second.

So AP continues in their report, which was updated this morning, at least 28 bodies have been pulled from the Potomac River already. Others are still being searched for. The plane that carried 60 passengers and four crew members included a number of children who were training to be in the Olympics in skating one day.

This is a truly, truly tragic and horrific loss, and those families will never be whole again. We send our thoughts and prayers to them and our love and our solidarity, because let’s not forget what really happened here. People lost their lives.

So John Donnelly, the fire chief of the nation’s capital, announced that they are at the point where they’re switching from a rescue operation to a recovery operation. This is very similar to what we experienced here in Baltimore in March of last year, when the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed — And Trump and Republicans tried to blame that on DEI too. We’ll get to that later — But there was a harrowing number of hours where loved ones and community members were hoping against hope that their loved ones who were working on that bridge — These were immigrant construction workers working in the middle of the night who, as we reported here at The Real News Network, received no warning that they were about to meet their deaths [to] a ship that was about to crash into the bridge they were working on. So we were in that same wait-and-see mode too, where hoping to retrieve living people turned into trying to recover deceased people. And as per the official notice, there are no expected survivors. This is a recovery mission, not a search and rescue mission.

As Mel mentioned, this is the deadliest air crash over US airspace since the 9/11 attacks that happened in 2001. Collectively, those attacks killed 2,996 people on the day of the attack. There’s no immediate word, as I said, on the cause of the collision, but officials have said that flight conditions were clear as the jet arrived from Wichita, Kansas, with US and Russian figure skaters and others on board. A quote from American Airlines CEO, Robert Isom, he said, “On final approach into Reagan National, the plane collided with a military aircraft on an otherwise normal approach.”

Now, a top Army aviation official did say that the Black Hawk crew was “very experienced and familiar with the congested flying conditions of Reagan National Airport.” For those who don’t live in and around DC, this is an extremely busy airport in a densely populated part of the city that has been increasing air traffic for years. Mel and I will talk about that more in a minute.

But point being is that, from the American Airlines side, from the military side, there appeared to be no interceding conditions like extreme weather that may have caused this crash that we know of so far. Investigators are going to be analyzing the flight data that they can retrieve from these two flights before making their final assessment.

The transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, who was sworn in this week, said that there were “early indicators of what happened”, but he declined to elaborate on those, pending a further investigation.

Now, I’m going to wrap up here in a sec. As I mentioned, President Trump is giving a second press briefing as we speak. He gave another one this morning. I’m sure many of us saw it, or at least saw the headlines [on] it, because in this press conference, where the leader of the country is expected to lead, Trump did what Trump does best and blamed everybody else. Without evidence, Trump blamed the air traffic controllers, he blamed the helicopter pilots, and he explicitly called out Democratic policies at federal agencies. Trump claimed that the Federal Aviation Administration, the FAA, was “actively recruiting workers who suffer severe intellectual disabilities, psychiatric problems, and other mental and physical conditions under diversity and inclusion hiring initiatives.”

So as usual, the typical boogeyman of DEI being the thing at the root of all of our problems was the thing at the root of Trump’s press conference this morning. And MAGA Republicans have wasted no time reaffirming this line. And we’re going to talk a little more about that as the stream continues.

But those are essentially the basics of what we know and what we don’t right now. This is an unfolding story, but we think it does have a lot to tell us.

So Mel, I want to toss it to you to give us some of the broader context here that maybe people aren’t seeing, and they’re sure as hell not hearing from the White House press briefings right now.

Mel Buer:  Well, I think it’s important to note here that, just like with our railroad reporting that we did in 2022, that oftentimes what we’re looking at is a breakdown of policy among decision makers. We know that the AFA-CWA, and other unions that are involved in the aviation industry have been sounding the alarm about needing to have better staffing conditions at airports across the country. Those conditions have been worsening at least since 2013, so through successive administrations — Including the Trump administration where you had the chance to solve that problem and chose not to.

And especially in this DC airport, Freddie Brewster, Lois Parshley, and David Sirota wrote for Jacobin that “[…] lawmakers brushed off safety warnings amid midflight near-misses and passed an industry-backed measure designed to add additional flight traffic at the same DC airport where [the January 29] disaster unfolded.”

So really, I think the point that I’m trying to make here is that, while the aviation industry is trying to bring more flights into these airports — Which are welcome. We want to be able to reduce the congestion in terms of wait times for flights, having more options as consumers for traveling across this country — That also needs to come with heightened safety measures in terms of better staffing in the air traffic control towers.

Unions in the aviation industry have been really fighting for this for the last number of years. Just like with our railroad reporting, what we learned with the railroads was that lack of staffing and disregard for tried and trusted safety measures leads to accidents. And tragically, this is what happened here. That isn’t to say that folks aren’t fighting for this. That’s the big point that I want to make. And I think that, unfortunately, Trump’s blaming of these various groups really is not, to put it as lightly as possible, not helpful.

Maximillian Alvarez:  And it’s also not helpful, let’s also be clear, falling into the partisan trap of trying to blame Trump for all of this too. Because, as we are trying to show here, and as we show in our work at The Real News, these are longstanding problems that have had bipartisan support for many years. Trump is definitely making these problems worse, but he is not the originator of the problem. You can see that in the question of understaffing.

Now, of course, a number of pundits and politicians have pointed to the fact that, just last week, Donald Trump put a hiring freeze for federal employees, which would include hiring new air traffic controllers at a moment when we’ve been experiencing an extended air traffic controller shortage. We’ll talk a bit more about that in a second. But also, of course, Trump’s firing of high-level officials, even the heads of the TSA, the FAA, and members of the very commissions that are there to ensure air flight safety.

So, of course, the impulse is to look at that and see, well, see, Trump did this last week, and now this week we have a plane crash. It’s a little more complex than that.

As I speak to you now, there is a live update from The New York Times that came out just 10 minutes ago. Sparse on information, but the information reads: “Live update: Control tower staffing was ‘not normal’ during deadly crash, FAA report says. An internal report suggested that the controller on duty the night of the accident was doing a job usually handled by two people.”

And so what we are trying to show y’all is that that situation did not come from nowhere, and it is not a situation that is, sadly, particular to air traffic controllers. This is something that Mel and I hear in the worker interviews that we do in industries around the country, the crisis of deliberate understaffing in critical industries, including those that have a direct bearing on our own public safety.

And like with the railroads Mel mentioned, to refresh your memories, a couple years ago, if we all recall, the US was approaching its first potential railroad strike in 30 years. We had been interviewing railroad workers across the industry: engineers, conductors, signalmen, carmen, dispatchers, all of whom were telling us different versions of the same story, which is that the corporate consolidation, the government deregulation, and the Wall Street takeover of the rail industry had created this process that has built into a crisis over decades, where the railroads have become more profitable than ever by cutting their costs year after year after year.

So what does that mean? It means cutting labor costs, cutting safety costs, making those trains longer, heavier, piled with more dangerous cargo, while having fewer and fewer workers on the trains, and also fewer and fewer workers in the machine shops, checking the track, in the dispatch offices.

The point is that when these layoffs happen, when these corporate restructurings happen, when these policies are implemented in key industries like logistics industries, like aviation, you are not just firing people, you are removing layers of security that are there for a reason. And you’re doing so for the benefit, the short-term benefit of higher profits, while the long-term costs are borne by the workers in those industries, the public that is being hurt by them, and even by the customers who use those industries. Rail shippers are as pissed off as rail workers are right now.

So the point being that Mel and I hear this in education: teacher shortages, more students piled onto fewer teachers leading to worse education outcomes; healthcare: hospital workers who have been burnt out before COVID, even more so since COVID, more patients piled onto fewer nurses leading to declining quality of care, treating patients more like grist for the mill: Get ’em in, get ’em out. This is a system-wide problem. We are seeing the effects across the economy, and we can see it here in this tragic plane crash that has claimed the lives of nearly 70 people.

In fact, this is much like the horrific train accident that occurred in East Palestinian, Ohio, on Feb. 3. The anniversary’s coming up, the two year anniversary of that. And the workers on the railroads warned us that something like that would happen, and then it did — Just like workers in the aviation industry, as Mel mentioned, have been warning us that something like this would happen, and now it has.

But we have been dancing on the lip of this volcano for a long time. We’re just waking up to the reality now. I want to underline this point by quoting from a really great Jacobin article that was published in 2023 by Joseph A. McCartin titled “The US is Facing a Growing Air Safety Crisis. We have Ronald Reagan to Thank for It”. Again, this was not published this week, this was published during the Biden administration. McCartin makes the very clear point that “On March 15, 2023, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) held a ‘safety summit’ in McLean, Virginia, gathering more than 200 ‘safety leaders’ from across American aviation to discuss ‘ways to enhance flight safety.’ What prompted the unusual summit was, by the FAA’s own admission, a ‘string of recent safety incidents, several of which involved airplanes coming too close together during takeoff or landing.’” And McCartin also notes in that same article that “A recent internal study by the inspector general of the US Department of Transportation found that 20 of 26 critical facilities (77% of them) are staffed below the FAA’s 85% threshold.”

So again, don’t get it twisted. What Trump is doing is making the problem worse. It’s pouring gasoline on the fire, but this fire was burning before Trump came into office.

And Mel, as you said, this is something that we’ve had workers in these industries decrying for many, many years. And this is also something that we need to have a long, historical view on. Because as McCartin mentioned in that article, we do have Ronald Reagan to thank for a lot of this.

And I wanted to hover on that point for a second because, as we know, one of President Ronald Reagan’s most infamous acts in his first presidential term was to fire striking air traffic controllers, over [11,000] of them. It was a significant, massive percentage of the existing air traffic controller workforce in 1981. Not only did this unleash a new age of union busting across the private sector and elsewhere, but it also is directly relevant to what we’re talking about here. Because when you fire that many air traffic controllers, as Reagan did, this was 11,000, approximately 70% of the controller workforce at the time, that Reagan fired in 1981 and then tried to replace.

So a point that maybe we don’t think about but that actually connects to the air traffic controller shortage now is that when you, in one year, eliminate 70% of that workforce and then you replace it with new hires in the next two to three, four years, you are creating, essentially, a generational problem where those new hires in the 1980s are retiring in 30 years, and then the process starts again, where suddenly you have a massive aging out of the existing workforce and a dire need to replace those understaffed agencies.

So we are still feeling the staffing ripple effects and the safety impacts that has from Ronald Reagan’s original firing of the air traffic controllers. We have not fixed that problem. And as we’ve said a number of times, air traffic controllers continue to be chronically understaffed, which means all of us who fly are flying at their mercy, and our safety hangs on the overworked shoulders of understaffed air traffic controllers across the country right now. And I don’t know, does that make you feel safe, Mel? It doesn’t make me feel safe.

Mel Buer:  No. I take the train. I already have enough air anxiety.

The reality is, I think, as well when you’re talking about, particularly with the PATCO strike, but in any industry where there is high turnover, there is not really a space for the concentration of expertise. PATCO is a huge example of this where you have career air traffic controllers who have amassed, collectively, hundreds of years of collective experience and how to work this industry and do it safely. And you’re training new hires who may or may not have the same experience, or you’re shuffling folks into these departments. You’re not going to get the same level standard of expertise. We see it in healthcare, we see it in really any industry that has high turnover, from the people who make your coffee drinks all the way up to the engineers who make your planes that you ride on. So this is a huge problem, and we will discuss this a little bit later when we’re talking about what’s going on in the federal government as well.

But that is an important point to make, that what we’re seeing with this lack of staffing is really a lack of expertise. The ability to have internally these checks and balances that create the safety conditions that we rely on in order for us to live our lives without fear of falling out of the sky, literally. So that’s a really important point here.

And again, unions like the AFA-CWA and the machinists who work with Boeing are acutely aware of that and are willing and able to bolster this workforce. But you cannot attract a new generation of smart, capable, hardworking, willing people to buy into this industry and provide their expertise to this industry if you don’t have a competitive job to offer them. And that happens a lot in healthcare as well.

So it’s a top-down problem. It’s not that folks don’t want to do these jobs, it’s really, is this job going to be doable? Am I going to be able to pay my bills? Is my family going to be OK? Am I going to be able to get a pension? Am I going to be able to do this job, to the best of my ability, without working 120 hours a week and get paid nothing, functionally, for it?

And again, these unions are really acutely aware of this issue and are bargaining hard to solve these problems. Unfortunately, in many cases, they’re coming up against an intractable management who cares more about increasing profits for shareholders than actually creating a workplace that is competitive and that is also operating at a higher standard.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Let’s talk a little bit while we’re closing out this section. It does hook into another key subject that we wanted to talk about today, which is Trump and the Trump administration’s all-out attack on federal workers, and the vilification of federal workers as nameless, faceless, useless, even evil bureaucrats of the deep state who need to be chucked out, fired, eliminated, disciplined.

And if we’re not understanding who those people are and what they do, that may sound good, and people are going to cheer on Trump’s policies. But what we’re trying to say here is that we need to have a clear-eyed vision of actually who these people are, what they do, and how it directly impacts our lives. And the point being is that you cannot solve these potentially society-destroying, society-imperiling problems if you are not correctly diagnosing the problem itself.

That is why the attacks on DEI and the harnessing of DEI to create an explanation for all of this is really, really sinister. Because, like I said, they tried to do this when the Baltimore bridge collapsed. They blamed it on DEI here too. When the LA fires, where Mel and I are from, our homes are burning and have been burning for the past two weeks. And while we’re trying to talk to our loved ones and find out if they’re OK, this whole media cycle is blaming the fires and the destruction on DEI and woke Democratic policies. Now this plane crash happens, these people die, and immediately, before their bodies are retrieved from the Potomac River, Donald Trump is out there from the White House press office saying that it was DEI that caused the problem.

I don’t know how it can get any more obvious that this is political snake oil. It is a built-in perennial excuse crafted by the very same corrupt business lobbies and politicians who are endangering our lives for profit so that they can quite literally get away with killing us and then blame it on a fictional boogeyman. We can talk about the issues with DEI — We’ve got plenty of them — But trying to explain tragedies like this through a DEI-only lens is nuts. It’s stupid. It is ignoring the realities that are screaming in our faces and in the workers who are living those realities and who are telling us what the problem is.

There’s something really telling about that because this attack on DEI and this attempt to turn DEI into the catchall explanation is, in fact, capitalists, their own fake solution to the problem that capitalists themselves have created, capitalizing on the pain that they have caused through decades of rampant union busting, layoffs, disciplining of labor, focusing on only maximizing short-term profits for executives and Wall Street shareholders while putting us all at long-term risk by removing necessary safety measures and checks and balances and accountability, the onslaught of deregulation over the course of decades.

The point being is that I want to be very clear and apparent here. I grew up conservative. I’ve said this many times. I’ve been open about it on our show, on this network. And so, I have a living memory of being a Republican and championing other Republicans throughout the ’90s and early aughts who kept saying we need to break the backs of unions. We need to privatize government. We need to unleash the genius of the free market and deregulate as many industries as possible so that the genius of the market can lead us to a better society. I believed in all that stuff. I cheered it on.

And it’s like no one remembers that the same Republicans, Trump himself included, who cheered this on 20 years ago, the same corporations that didn’t want to take ownership over it are now trying to turn around and blame DEI for the things that they got what they wanted. It screwed up society the way that people were saying it was going to. And now the same people who profited from that, the same people who pushed that policy are turning around and trying to create a boogeyman in DEI and wokeism to get off scot-free.

And we are letting them, the corporate criminals, the Wall Street vampires, the corrupt politicians who have put us in this dangerous position, get off scot-free and convince us to blame our neighbors and coworkers and policies like DEI for the problems that they’ve created. That’s absurd.

I want to bring us to the way to fight this is not in a conceptual, policy-only way, but to, again, look at the ground level and understand who and what we’re actually talking about, and where the problems are and where they are not. I think that this horrific tragedy really points us, instructively, to a couple of core truths that are deeply relevant as we watch what the Trump administration is doing right now, using the corporate crafted language of inefficiency and bloat and overstaffing, they’re importing these tactics from the private sector into government. It reveals how that kind of thinking from the private market fundamentally misunderstands what and who the government is.

The evil bureaucrats of the deep state, they are people like the members of the Aviation Security Advisory Committee that Trump fired last week. They are the overworked air traffic controllers that are making sure that our planes don’t crash while they’re getting no sleep. They are the civil servants throughout the government who are being pushed to voluntarily resign and who are being reclassified under Schedule F so that they become at-will employees who are easier to fire. You may not like the government for many justifiable reasons, but without the people who make it work, nothing works for us.

I want to show how the leaders in labor, folks in labor that Mel was talking about, have actually been telling us this for many years. On The Real News here last week I interviewed the great Sara Nelson, the international president of the Association of Flight Attendants, CWA AFL-CIO. If you recall, Sara Nelson became a household name during the Trump-led GOP-led government shutdown of 2018 and 2019, 6 years ago. It was the longest government shutdown in our country’s history.

And Sara Nelson steps out of the world of organized labor and into the public limelight as this shutdown, which furloughed 300,000 federal workers while keeping 400,000 federal workers working for 35 days without pay. So people like air traffic controllers working all that time while also working second jobs so that they could feed their families. We were at the verge of another horrific tragedy like this back during the government shutdown in 2018, 2019.

But Sara Nelson and the flight attendants were the ones who were making that point, because in DC it was all, oh, this is about Trump’s border wall, this is not about Trump’s border wall. It was the same kind of thing like we’re talking about DEI and wokeism now, but we’re not talking about the actual goddamn problem.

So let’s tee up these clips of Sara Nelson speaking to the public in January of 2019 making that case during the longest government shutdown of US history.

[FIRST CLIP BEGINS]

Sara Nelson:  We are here today because we are concerned about our safety, our security, and our economic stability, our jobs. For years, the right has vilified federal workers as nameless, faceless bureaucrats. But the truth is they’re air traffic controllers, they’re food inspectors, they’re transportation security officers and law enforcement. They’re the people who live and work in our communities, and they are being hurt.

This is about our safety and security, and our jobs, and our entire country’s economic stability. No one will get out of this unscathed if we do not stop this shutdown. Leader McConnell, you can fix this today. If you don’t show the leadership to bring your caucus to a vote to open the government today, then we are calling on the conscientious members of your caucus to do it for you. There is no excuse to continue this. This is not a political game. Open the government today.

[SECOND CLIP BEGINS]

Sara Nelson:  We are calling on the public on Feb. 16, if we are in a day 36 of this shutdown, for everyone to come to the airports. Everyone come to the airports and demand that this Congress work for us and get politics out of our safety and security.

[CLIP ENDS]

Maximillian Alvarez:  I would highly recommend that everyone watching this stream, live or after the fact, go watch that full interview that we did with Sara Nelson. Listen to what she says and apply it to the situation that we’re seeing now. Especially those final words, that this is not about an ideological battle between Trump, MAGA and the deep state and wokeism and DEI. This is about a corporate class of tyrants who are destroying the people, jobs, and agencies that our basic safety and needs depend on.

There’s something, I think, really important here about the lessons that unions and labor specifically can teach us about what’s going to happen here, who’s fighting back against this.

Mel, I wanted to toss it to you to give folks a few points about that before we move on to the other stories.

Mel Buer:  Well, it’s like I’ve been saying. Unions across this country, in small shops, in large shops, in regions, all across the country, from a small coffee shop that’s taking on Nestle to the UAW getting plants reopened in Illinois, all of these struggles are tapped into what I think is a really key thing that we as labor reporters pay attention to, which is to say, workers are experts in their own workplace. They know what’s working, what’s not working, because they’re there every day, and they have generally pretty good ideas about how to improve these industries for the people who work in them and for the consumers and the individuals who are touched by these industries.

So when you see these labor struggles where you might, oh, I don’t know, disagree with tactics or find certain things to be a little odious, or you’re not sure why a certain thing is being offered in a contract or in a bargaining session or on a picket line, you might open up a conversation with those workers, if you’re there, and ask them why it’s important. Because ultimately, from the federal government all the way down to the smallest shop in your city, individuals know what’s going on, and their ideas might actually improve our lives.

And that’s really what the AFA-CWA is trying to do, is what the machinists tried to do at Boeing. We’re seeing this play out in successive industries all across this country. Especially now in this new administration that has already styled itself through its actions as being adversarial to the labor movement, it’s important. It’s important for us to pay attention to these things.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Just to underline what Mel just said there, again, as two reporters, co-hosts of Working People who talk to workers about this stuff every single week, if we sound like broken records, it’s because we keep hearing the same thing from all these workers and we’re trying to get people to listen to them.

But that’s a really, really critical point here. If it feels like there’s no solution to these problems in DC right now, that doesn’t mean there’s no one fighting for a real solution. Over 30,000 machinists, as Mel mentioned, went on strike at Boeing late last year. Let’s not forget Boeing’s role in all of this. Let’s not forget the Boeing planes that have been falling out of the sky over the past decades, and the way the same corporate Wall Street brain disease that took once the most vaunted airline manufacturer in the world, had the best reputation for its product in the world, how it went from that to being the laughing stock of the world and the kind of plane no one wants to get on because we’re all terrified that the plane’s going to fall out of the sky.

Who’s fighting for that? And how did that happen? It didn’t happen overnight. But the workers who went on strike at Boeing last year, they’re fighting to have a say in that. They’re fighting to have a say in the corporate policies that have put all of us in danger. Just like the railroad workers were not only fighting for pay for themselves and better time off policies for their families, but they were doing that so that they could actually do their jobs well and safely and not put us in danger when their trains are bombing past our T-ball games.

So there is an inherent connection between what workers in specific industries, unions in specific jobs, are fighting for that we have a vested interest in, and we should really think about that, not only in terms of why we should support those struggles, but what that says about alternative pathways for solutions when it feels like the bipartisan politics in DC are presenting none.

So just wanted to underline that great point that Mel made. We got more to talk about here, but if nothing else, we hope that you take that point away from what we’re saying here.

Mel Buer:  I think a great way to move forward in this conversation is to take a moment here to break down what’s been going on over the last week at the federal level. One of the big things — And it’s been probably the most dominant in headlines over the last five days or so — Is this funding freeze fiasco that’s been going on.

On Monday night, the Trump administration sent out a late night memo essentially freezing all federal grants and not allowing them to be dispersed to the states and organizations that were scheduled to receive them.

Keep this in mind when we’re talking about this, as I’m sure you’ve read about over the last couple of days, but these are funds that Congress has already approved for disbursement to all 50 states. State governments use these funds for a wide variety of items, from SNAP benefits to Pell Grants for students, to research grants, and everything in between, to the tune of trillions of dollars. These grants pay the rent for workers, they keep folks employed, they keep families fed. In the last couple of days, representatives and governors from states all over the country have registered their alarm and outrage at the move, and they began maneuvering to try and kill the order before it had a chance to really be implemented.

But I really do want to underscore something here, as I would like to read a piece from this memo that was sent out and ultimately rescinded as of yesterday, to underscore the breadth of it and also what may have caused some pretty intense confusion.

So this is a quote from the original memo that was sent from the Office of Management and Budget, and it says “Financial assistance should be dedicated to advancing Administration [sic] priorities, focusing taxpayer dollars to advance a stronger and safer America, eliminating the financial burden of inflation for citizens, unleashing American energy and manufacturing, ending ‘wokeness’ and the weaponization of government, promoting efficiency in government, and Making America Healthy Again [sic]. The use of Federal [sic] resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies is a waste of taxpayer dollars that does not improve the day-to-day lives of those we serve. 

“This memorandum requires Federal agencies to identify and review all Federal financial assistance programs and supporting activities consistent with the President’s policies and requirements. 

“[…] To implement these orders, each agency must complete a comprehensive analysis of all of their Federal financial assistance programs to identify programs, projects, and activities that may be implicated by any of the President’s executive orders. In the interim, to the extent permissible under applicable law, Federal agencies must temporarily pause all activities related to obligation or disbursement of all Federal financial assistance, and other relevant agency activities that may be implicated by the executive orders, including, but not limited to, financial assistance for foreign aid, nongovernmental organizations, DEI, woke gender ideology, and the green new deal.”

Now, here’s the issue with this. This was the issue that many people have pointed out, and that is the subject of many lawsuits as well, is that this is very broad. And I’m taking a little bit of a charitable reading here, but I really shouldn’t. It’s nonsense is what it is. It’s called impoundment. It’s been illegal for many, many years, that the federal government, specifically the executive branch, cannot withhold these funds on the basis of political differences, which is essentially what this is when you include things like woke gender ideology and the Green New Deal.

And understandably, 23 states sued to create a temporary restraining order on this, which was a big piece of news on Tuesday, that there were moves from a variety of different places to try and stop the implementation of this directive and, ultimately, the executive order as it stands.

Why does this matter? This is what running the government like a business looks like. It’s not how you run a government, Max. I don’t know about you, but I think it’s an absolutely ridiculous idea, and I think a lot of people agree.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Yeah. I mean, again, I’m smiling because as a younger me who used to be a full-fledged Republican, loved the idea of running government like a business. And it just baffles me the more that I’ve grown and learned and seen in the world just how dumb I was to believe that that was a right-headed way to look at things.

I’ll touch on that in a second, but let’s step back. When we’re asking why does this matter, there are two key points here that Mel teed up that we really want to drive home. The first reason why this matters is because it is blatantly unconstitutional. But that on its own, sadly, doesn’t mean a whole lot to a lot of people out there today.

So if we just say, oh, it’s against the Constitution, what do we mean when we actually say that? If there’s one thing that every 4 to 5-year-old in this country knows about our country and our national mythology, it’s that America was founded because our ancestors didn’t want to be ruled by kings anymore. They did not. They had spent generations, centuries living under top-down, feudal-style, king-type power structures, and it sucked. It was a bad way to run societies.

And so we came to this new world and created a more democratic system — I say more democratic, not fully democratic. We know there are plenty of reasons in American history for why we were never a full fledged democracy. But the promise of democracy was meant as a direct refutation of the proven evils and inefficiencies of kingly rule. And so that’s why we have the damn system that we have set up, as imperfect as it is. There was a point to it.

So that’s what we mean when we say it’s unconstitutional, is it is violating that basic social contract upon which this whole country is founded, where a president should not have, by definition and by principle, the unilateral authority to govern by shooting [from] the hip through executive orders and totally circumventing the power of the purse that Congress has been democratically endowed with. There is a reason why the House has the power of the purse, why Congress has that power, because it’s meant to be the most beholden to the people, the most representative of the people. And so the people should, in theory, be the ones with that control over how this country spends its money.

And so the president, by definition, by principles, should not have and does not have the authority to just freeze trillions of dollars that have already been appropriated by that democratic, or more democratic, system and just decide that they’re going to halt that, freezing. They’re going to review stuff, and they’re going to determine who gets their funding and who doesn’t. That’s what happens in corporations, that’s what happens in, again, societies run by kings and queens. That’s not what’s supposed to happen in a democratic society, and there’s a reason for that.

So when we say it’s unconstitutional and that matters, there’s a really deep principle at work here that we should not be ruled by the whims and unilateral authority of one person. I think that’s a good thing. Again, otherwise, everything that all of us have ever learned in school about our country and why it’s good is wrong. So there’s that.

But then, there’s also another reason why this matters that Mel mentioned. This just really underlines the stupidity, the inappropriateness of thinking of government like a business, thinking of things like the US Postal Service in the terms of the private market and not thinking about the essential service that a functioning postal service provides to a functioning democracy. That is what the postal service is there to do: to make sure people get their damn mail, not just the people who can afford it. And so if you’re judging things like the US Postal Service by its profit margins or its returns on investment and you’re not including that social investment and that social benefit, that political benefit, then you’re not going to be able to assess the success of that agency or the government writ large.

I wanted to tee up a clip that we had pulled for a previous section, but I think it’s really apt here. It’s a clip from James Goodwin, who is the policy director for the Center of Progressive Reform. Now, I actually spoke with James when I was guest hosting an episode of Laura Flanders’s show — Shout out to the great journalist Laura Flanders and her show, Laura Flanders and Friends.

So Laura and I spoke with James last summer about Project 2025, its authors, its plans. But also one particular aspect of Project 2025, which is Schedule F, which is the order that Trump has already brought back in that recategorizes thousands of federal employees who have certain worker protections that are there for a reason, reclassifies them as at-will employees, the same way that most workers in this country are, you can be fired [snaps fingers] like that, without just cause.

So I asked James what the effect of this was going to be if these federal workers, with their worker protections, were suddenly made at-will employees under this regime, what effect would that have? So let’s play that clip really quick.

[CLIP BEGINS]

James Goodwin:  So what makes the foundation of our administrative state is the people, professional, apolitical experts. This is something we started building in this country in the late 1800s to replace what was known at the time as a spoils system. These jobs were essentially done by friends of the president or people in political power, and that was just a breeding ground for corruption and incompetence. This is what Schedule F would do, is it would return us to this system.

And so under this proposal, we would take all these experts, these tens of thousands of scientists, engineers, attorneys, what have you, we’d fire them. Who they’re getting replaced with is somebody whose only real skill is unquestioning loyalty to the president.

[CLIP ENDS]

Maximillian Alvarez:  So we’re not on the campaign trail anymore. This is no longer a what-if situation, this is happening. This is what they’re doing now. Russ Vought, one of the primary authors of Project 2025, is having his hearing right now to be in charge of the Office of Management and Budget so that he can implement the things that he has laid out, and the other authors of Project 2025 have laid out in Project 2025 itself. But we don’t have to get into that. The point being that let’s talk about this now that it’s actually happening instead of is this going to happen or not?

The point to really make here is what James said. Again, you can have all the justifiable problems that you have, that we have with the government as such, with certain government agencies that are not working properly or doing enough to serve the people. We all get that. But when you take the people who are actually making the government work as much as it is and you turn them into an unprotected, easily fireable class of employee who are, again, through this memo that was sent out to over 2 million government employees asking them to voluntarily leave the government while also pushing folks back to work in person, trying to get them to leave, all reclassifying workers under Schedule F so they could be more easily fired. The cumulative effect here is to purge the government of nonideologically-aligned federal workers and restock what’s left of those agencies with Trump-aligned loyalists.

This sounds great when you’re thinking in 21st century terms of running government like a business. But as James rightly points out, we’ve had this before. It’s the whole reason that the civil service exists. Because in the 18th century, we had a system that’s working like how Trump and his administration want it to work now, where appointees were loyalists, friends, family members, and it was a corrupt nightmare, and nothing got done, and people were furious about it. So they spent the 20th century trying to get the government to not be that. Now we’re going back. That perspective’s important. That’s why this also matters.

Mel Buer:  Yeah, agree. I think this makes a… I don’t know. It’s a rising mass of corruption that is just getting larger the farther we get into the Trump administration, they have a very clear policy agenda that they, I think, know that they might not realistically be able to slam through via legislative means, which is why the executive orders are happening in this way. Because they know that many of these bills that they would like to see happen will not get passed. They’ll get stopped. They’ll get sued out of existence. So the best thing they can do is do an executive order.

And this is what’s happened with this particular federal funding freeze memo. The outcry was really big this week. We had governors going on the TV to say, this directly affects my constituents. These people rely on unemployment insurance and SNAP benefits, WIC, and everything else in order to make sure that their families are fed. I’ve been receiving phone calls from panicked constituents for two days. This is not OK. There needs to be some pushback.

What ended up happening is there are multiple lawsuits that have been filed, including one where, I think, 23-plus states filed a lawsuit against this directive. They’re trying to get a judge to grant a temporary restraining order on it. After that lawsuit was filed, the White House rescinded that memo yesterday, and the White House press secretary, Leavitt, took to Twitter to clarify that it was just the memo itself that was rescinded and not the original order to begin to examine which federal funding could be frozen based on the investigations that they want to do into these appropriations. Lawyers took that, quite reasonably, I would say, to mean that the lawsuits they filed were still worth pursuing.

I know there was some confusion on social media yesterday that the memo being rescinded meant that the entire executive order was rescinded, and the press secretary’s clarification on Twitter keyed us into the fact that it was just the memo itself and that they were absolutely planning on continuing to move forward with the directives in the executive orders relating to this.

So lawyers made that case to Rhode Island US District Chief Judge John McConnell yesterday, and they quoted that tweet in their case that, despite rescinding the memo, the plans were still in place to freeze funding at some point in the future, if not in the next week. The judge agreed and allowed that TRO suit to proceed.

So where we’re at with this right now is that the memo has been rescinded. The plaintiffs in this case, for a temporary restraining order, the lawyers representing 23-plus states refiled their suit last night that seeks to prevent any blocking of federal financial obligations now and in the future, and also prohibits any reissues of the now rescinded directive. So the White House can’t, or the Office of Management and Budget, cannot put out another memo under different wording. They can’t wiggle their way around it by directing only some agencies to freeze their funding while this TRO is in effect.

So they’ve submitted this proposal to the judge. The DOJ has 24 hours to respond — Which, as of right before we went live, I don’t think they have responded quite yet — And then the judge will signal that a ruling is likely going to come at some point in the next couple of days.

So if he grants this TRO on this particular thing, that means that, for at least 14 days, there is no federal freezing of the funds. It means that SNAP benefits will be funded. It means that Pell Grants will be paid out. It means that federal Work-Study will still be available to students at universities, and all the way down the list. That TRO proposal also says that, if needed, they can extend that by another 14 days. So what we’re looking at is 14 to 30 days. Presumably it gives additional lawsuits the chance to move forward with this, or the Trump administration can take the L and back away from this policy and rescind this executive order.

I think this, amongst the 38 that have been filed — And I’m sure more that will be signed today and tomorrow and the next day — This seems to be the one that really kicked up a lot of dust and also kicked the opposition into gear a little bit more than what we’ve been seeing over the last two weeks to three months, because it really is confusing and broad, very, very broad, and affects a lot of people. So in terms of that litigation, hopefully it’s successful. We’ll see in the next couple of days.

One thing that I do want to end on with this specific issue is that there’s a lot of information that’s blurring past your [timeline]. We’re getting headlines every other day about some absolutely obscene, harrowing directives coming out of the White House, and they’re coming at this breakneck speed. There is a tracker that you can follow. Just Security publication has a tracker specifically about executive orders that the Trump administration is putting out and any litigation that is trying to challenge those orders in the future, including updates. They have a pretty solid team that’s doing this across the board, not just about the executive orders, but the tracker that they have is specific to that.

And I know that I was looking yesterday on Bluesky trying to find someone who is aggregating all of this, because you can only listen to so many group chats before you start getting stuck and spiraling a little bit because the information is… We will just say that there’s so much of it. So I found this tracker, I went through it, and I think it’s really great. We’ll put a link in our description, we’ll drop it in the chat for you, because if you’re like me and you want to stay informed, but you want to stay informed without doom spiraling and see how folks are actually challenging these things to varying degrees of success, then that’s a good place to start, I think.

Maximillian Alvarez:  And again, please let us know here at The Real News, in the live chat now, reach out to us on social media. Email us. That is our explicit goal too, as I said at the top of this livestream. It’s more important now than ever when it is an explicit tactic of this administration, it is an explicit prerogative of the social media platforms that we use to bombard us with information so that we stay on those platforms waiting for the next bit of information to come. But we’re not actually doing anything with that information except consuming it, fearfully reacting to it, or angrily reacting to it, and then moving on quickly to the next thing. And the more of us who are in that position, the less mobilized we are as a populace.

We here at The Real News believe that people, real people, working people across this country and around the world, are the solution to the problems that we’re experiencing. We are the ones who are going to work together to build the world that works for all of us. We fundamentally believe that you, me, everyone watching this is part of the solution.

We want to provide information, updates, analysis. We want to give you access to the voices you’re not hearing: the workers on the front lines, the people living in these sacrifice zones, the people brutalized by the police, the people brutalized by our broken healthcare system and our war industry that is wreaking death and destruction across the planet. We are trying to bring you in touch with those people, those voices, the movements that are trying to address them, and to get you to feel that you are part of that, and to understand that you can be part of these solutions.

So we want to hear from you if we’re doing a good job of that, and if there’s other kinds of information, other voices, other perspectives that you want us to provide so that you feel more empowered to act and to do something and to be part of the solution here. So please do also reach out to us and share with us any suggestions or recommendations that you’ve got there.

We’ve got about 25 minutes left in this livestream. We also want to hear if this was helpful to you. We are not going to be able to get to some questions from the live chat itself today, but we have been sourcing questions from y’all leading up to this livestream on social media. We have a text service that you can get Real News updates on through text messaging. Folks have been sending us great questions ahead of this livestream through that service, and you can learn more about how to sign up for it in the live chat right now.

So we are going to end in a few minutes. Mel and I will step back a bit and assess based on these questions that we got before the stream began in the final 15 minutes here.

But before we get there, I know, Mel, there is another key story that we’ve both been really concerned about, but you really want to impress upon viewers why this is one of those headlines passing your timeline that you should actually focus on.

Mel Buer:  Yeah, so in the last week or so, there’s been a bit of a… I hesitate to use the word shakeup, but there have been some changes with the NLRB. And what we’ve been seeing is that NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo was fired. Honestly, I think most folks were expecting that. There was a changeover.

What she does is she’s the top adjudicator, prosecutor, investigator for the NLRB. She’s been really good at bringing forth some really important policy changes and also rule changes that really have helped workers organize. She’s been really tough on bosses, and holding corporations like Amazon’s feet to the fire. We kind of expected that to happen. It happened when Biden took over in 2021. There was a shakeup there with the general counselor, if I [remember] correctly. And so we kind of expected that to happen.

What is surprising is that the NLRB chair, Gwynne Wilcox, was also fired. She was appointed in December, I think, appointed and confirmed in December. And she is the first Black woman member of the NLRB. She is also supposed to keep her job through the next couple of years. As it stands, the NLRA and the various policies do not have provisions. These board members are not at-will members. They’re supposed to serve out their term unless there is some sort of malfeasance or a specific event that someone can point to in the administration to fire any member of the board. You can’t do it. So it was very surprising to see Gwynne Wilcox fired at the beginning of this week.

There is a statement here from the AFL-CIO president, Liz Shuler, that I want to read a little bit here that says, “President Trump’s firing of NLRB member Gwynne Wilcox, the first Black woman to serve on the board, is illegal and will have immediate consequences for working people. By leaving only two board members in their posts, the President has effectively shut down the National Labor Relations Board’s operation, leaving the workers it defends on their own in the face of union busting and retaliation. Alongside the firing of NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo, these moves will make it easier for bosses to violate the law and trample on workers’ legal rights on the job and fundamental freedom to organize.”

Now this is important, and we’ll talk about this just in a moment, about what exactly the NLRB does on a granular level. But the way that the NLRB essentially operates is that the board is the adjudicators. They make decisions on union elections, they make decisions on investigations into workplaces. They make decisions on unfair labor practice charges that will bring consequences against employers when they treat their workers badly, break the law, retaliate, fire workers for union organizing, any number of things.

In order for the board to operate, there has to be quorum. So of the five members, there has to be at least three appointed working members of the board. Right now there are vacancies, which is also surprising. Normally, in the normal course of things, an incoming president will use those vacancies to shift decision-making. There were two vacancies on the board that would’ve, I think, if you’re talking about the strategy here, would have changed policy at the NLRB by itself.

Now there’s only two members of the board after Gwynne Wilcox has been fired, which means the board doesn’t have quorum. They do not have the authority to make decisions until they have quorum. So any of the things that the board could do to uphold the NLRA, which is to say the enforcement of the law that protects worker rights in this country, can’t happen until a new person is appointed and confirmed or until Wilcox is reinstated, which she has indicated that she will pursue whatever legal avenues that she has to be reinstated to fight this firing, because again, it’s illegal. It’s illegal what Trump did. I’m not trying to create this doom spiral, but this is concerning. It’s very alarming, and it’s important that we underscore that.

I know that there are folks among the labor movement who would love to see the Wild West of labor organizing return. We may actually see that at some point in the future. But at the moment, what we have with the NLRA is workable. It’s not great, but it is workable, and it does keep individuals employed. It keeps individuals from getting hurt on the job. It keeps individuals from being fired for organizing. And if we don’t have an NLRB that can enforce that because it’s been hobbled by this particular thing, it’s not great, Max.

Maximillian Alvarez:  No. I forget who the quote came from, I think it was a Democratic legislator, but it was like, the message right now is workers are on their own. And functionally that is correct, because the NLRB, insufficient as it is — And we have reported on that too. We’ve reported on how understaffed, underfunded the NLRB is and has been for years. We’ve reported over the years about how the NLRB should be more aggressive in enforcing labor law. Again, we can walk and chew gum at the same time. The NLRB cannot be perfect, but things can be a lot worse without it. We’re capable of having that conversation.

But we need to understand also what that means in real terms. And so I want to tee up a clip here from Mel and my’s podcast, Working People, where I spoke with workers at the National Labor Relations Board, like rank and file workers, labor lawyers, people who are doing the work of the agency and who are also both representatives in the NLRB union.

So this was actually an interview that we did when we were approaching the threshold of a government shutdown in, I think that was September, 2023. Remember, that was the congressional Republicans internal fighting over more spending cuts, border security, no military aid to Ukraine. It was a high-stakes fight between McCarthy and Matt Gaetz. So it was in that period that I spoke with Colton Puckett and Michael Billick, legislative co-chairs of the NLRB union and full-time NLRB workers, about just what it is that they and other NLRB staff do and the role that that work plays in our daily working lives. So let’s listen to that clip right now.

[CLIP BEGINS]

Colton Puckett:  At a high level, the core functions that we do that, I think, most folks that know about our agency know about what we do, and that’s we investigate unfair labor practice charges. So someone believes that their employer or their union has violated the law in some way. They can file a charge with us, and we investigate it and figure out whether or not the charge has merit. That’s a big portion of the work we do, and I’ll talk a little bit more about what that means.

But another big thing that we do is we run union elections, essentially. And so when workers come together, they decide, we want to form a union, we want to join a union, they’ll file a petition with us. There’s a certain process that entails. And then when it comes time to actually hold the election, we in the field go to wherever that election is taking place and we make sure that it’s done, and done in as fair and impartial a way as is possible.

And then the last thing we do, another big thing that is part and parcel with unfair labor practice investigations is we try cases. So if we find that there is merit to one of these unfair labor practice charges that we get, we always will try to settle a case, of course, but sometimes it doesn’t work out. So that means we actually go to trial before an administrative law judge and we litigate the case and we try and prove the violation. And it’s similar to, it’s not exactly like going to federal court, but it’s the same general idea. And so that’s another big portion of the work that we do.

And so that’s the big three things at a very high level. But I think sometimes getting into the day-to-day, some of that can get lost.

As field staff, I think Mike mentioned at the top, we work in offices spread all around the country. We are essentially the front line of the agency for working people all across the country. That means that we interface directly with workers every single day, whether that’s a charging party, we’re trying to help them figure out how to e-file their evidence, for example, or figure out what they need to send to us that might be useful versus what not to, or if we’re just answering questions about where their case is in the process or what certain processes means because a lot of this is legalese, and we don’t expect everybody to know exactly what an unfair labor practice is. That’s a big portion of the work we do.

One of the things that we do, there’s one in every regional office, there’s an information officer on duty every day. You can call your regional office — They might not answer immediately, but leave a voicemail and you will talk to a live person that day, and they will walk you through any questions that you have. If you want to file a charge, they can assist you in preparing the charge and informing you how to do that. And I don’t necessarily know that a lot of other federal agencies have that type of direct person-to-person interaction in that way.

And so that’s a big thing that we do. We talk to folks all the time and then just try and help them understand what it is we do and what it is their rights are.

[CLIP ENDS]

Maximillian Alvarez:  All right. So that’s not nothing. That’s not evil bureaucracy. That’s real shit that real working people depend on. In the final minutes here, Mel and I wanted to drive this point home, because we could be playing clips for the next five hours of real world examples that real world workers have told us on our podcast about when they needed the NLRB to adjudicate an injustice, a violation of their rights, and how important that was to their livelihoods, how important it was to their union drive, how important it was for the labor movement itself. But that’s what we’re trying to get y’all to see is that this is not just conceptual, nameless, faceless bureaucratic stuff. That’s what they do. That’s what folks at the NLRB do.

And just to give one example that was the first field report that I did when I started here at The Real News in the middle of COVID in 2020. Let’s not forget that early in 2021, one of the biggest stories in the country was that workers in Bessemer, Alabama, majority Black, deindustrialized Bessemer, Alabama, with twice the national poverty rate, that they were leading the charge to form the country’s first unionized workforce at an Amazon facility. Now, we know that they ended up being unsuccessful in that union drive, but that drive sparked so many of the other labor struggles that we’ve reported on over the past few years, including [contributing] to the Amazon Labor Union’s successful unionization drive in New York.

And so that’s a real world example. I was there on the ground, Mel was talking to these workers, I’ve talked to these workers, I’ve been in their union hall. They tried to hold a union election, which is their right, that is their democratic right, to vote on whether or not they want a union, even if it is at the second largest private employer in the country and one of the biggest international behemoths in the world. These workers had that right and they exercised it.

And the National Labor Relations Board ruled that Amazon had illegally interfered in that election by placing a US Postal Service mailbox on Amazon property right in front of the employee entrance with the Amazon cameras pointed on it. And so the NLRB said, hey, that’s not a free and fair election. This is intimidation, this is surveillance. You guys have to have another election. They had that enforcement ability to give workers in Bessemer another chance, a fair shot at a union election.

So that’s just one example of a high-stakes ruling that both shows how Amazon is a much bigger behemoth than the NLRB can take on its own. But that ruling really mattered for workers who were really fighting for what they believed in.

Mel, I know you’ve seen tons of others. Are there any few you want to highlight here real quick?

Mel Buer:  Well, I think I want to just, I could name ’em all up top of the bat. We can do Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Strike. It’s a ULP strike. We can do half of the walkouts at Starbucks started with ULPs fired because bargaining wasn’t starting fast enough. We can talk about pretty much, I would say, a sizable chunk of a worker’s ability to withhold their work legally begins with the filing of a ULP.

And the NLRB has to reach a certain place with that, where you are filing this grievance and you say, we have checked our boxes and we’ve filed this ULP that says bargaining is not going well. The company’s bargaining in bad faith, which means they are not actually giving a good faith effort to sit across the table and work through this contract negotiation like we are. They have actively endangered workers, for example, at Starbucks during the LA firestorm. They have enacted policies that are retaliatory. They have held captive audience meetings.

When we are trying to form a union, all of these rulings that the NLRB rules on are designed to free and fairly investigate these complaints and then to actually offer some sort of recourse for workers, whether that means ordering management back to the table and telling ’em to stuff it and get the job done, or whether that means enacting no captive audience meetings in workplaces. Whether that means allowing individuals to be on company grounds to organize off hours, to pull in people and have conversations to work on a union campaign that’s gone public. All of these things are what the NLRB helps us do. And there are dozens, dozens of people, dozens of campaigns that I’ve talked to, that I’ve reported on [just] in the last year where the outcome, in some way or another, depends upon what the NLRB can do for them.

That’s just the place that we’re in. That’s the recourse that we have right now. We have to thread that needle and to use the law, as inadequate as it is, to our benefit, and be able to work within that and use the NLRB as an agency for what it’s there for. Which is to say, often I look at the NLRB’s policies in the last 10 years or so. When we have a board that is really pro-worker focused, a lot of things can happen.

Final example I’ll give is that in 2017, the NLRB was full of pro-business folks that Trump had appointed. During Trump’s administration, and then the subsequent administration after, there was really this watershed moment with graduate student organizing where, during Trump’s administration, there were restraints on which type of graduate students could organize on college campuses. That rule changed in the last five, six years as a result of a more pro-worker NLRB makeup, and there has been an explosion in new organizing on university campuses that we didn’t see before. By some metrics, it is the fastest and most consistent organizing that has happened in this country in the last five years.

So it underscores the importance of what this agency can do for us as workers, and what this agency can do for us as a workers’ movement. And so when it’s hobbled by an administration, as it has been in the Trump administration, things become exponentially more difficult.

My fellow union workers at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette waited for a year and a half for a decision on the ULP that they filed. They’ve been on strike for over three years at this point, trying to get the company at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette to bargain fairly and to stop playing games with their health insurance and their livelihoods. And the NLRB is really the thing that’s driving those consequences so they can get back to the table and get back to work.

So as much as we want to sit here and say that, oh, it’s just another bunch of feckless bureaucrats — No, it has real world implications for how we can organize in the future. And I truly believe that, in terms of movement building in this country, the labor movement is an integral part to that, for all its faults. That institution needs to use the tools that it has at its disposal.

So when an administration — Any administration, because I’m not saying that Democratic administrations in the past haven’t used the NLRB as a cudgel, haven’t deliberately underfunded it and understaffed it because they are also only pro-worker in name, but not really in action. It’s important for us to be able to uphold this institution because it helps us maintain some semblance of control over our workplaces, at least for now. We will see what the next 10, 15 years look like.

As Hamilton Nolan has said, the Democrats squander their chance to really rebuild the labor movement — I agree — And we are now in single digits a little bit in terms of union density, but we’re not cooked by any stretch of the imagination. And if we can pay attention to and internalize the fact that some of these agencies and the work that they do is actually really useful for our movement building, then I think we have a better chance of staving off the worst impulses of this fascist government.

Maximillian Alvarez:  No, I think that’s powerfully put, Mel. Just again, a plea to everyone watching: If you’ve been watching our reporting over these past few years or other people’s reporting on the Starbucks union drive, the Amazon union drive, but not just those; healthcare workers going on strike for their patients, teachers and educators going on strike for their students, their communities, manufacturing in the auto industry and beyond. John Deere workers, journalists at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, entertainers at Medieval Times. These struggles of working people where people like you and me have realized that if they band together, exercise their rights, form a union, and work together as a union, that they can actually change their lives, they can change their circumstances, they can even change our society’s circumstances, like the machinists going on strike at Boeing or the railroad workers fighting for rail safety that impacts all of us, like we were talking about earlier in the stream.

All of that is going to be so deeply impacted by a nonfunctional NLRB or an NLRB that is functional but actively hostile to the workers’ side of the struggle and is doing the bidding of the employer class. I don’t know what the stories we report are going to be. I don’t know what the workers we interview are going to say in the coming years if that is the case, but I promise you it’s not going to be what it’s been in the past few years where workers have seen this groundswell, and they’ve wanted to be part of it, and they’ve seen a path to unionization with an NLRB that actually is functional enough to serve the needs of working people trying to exercise their rights. We are not in that territory anymore.

So even if you don’t give a shit about anything in DC — Which I would totally forgive you for — If you give a shit about the labor movement and working people, this is going to impact that, this is going to impact you.

And we don’t know what the ripple effects are going to be to the business class, to the private sector, to all the employers out there who now know that workers are on their own like they did after Reagan fired the PATCO strikers in ’81. We don’t know what the cascading effect is going to be if employers decide to go more on the offensive in squashing unionization efforts, more on the offensive in rolling back workers’ rights, treating workers like shit, knowing that they’re going to have fewer options for recourse through the NLRB. So if nothing else, let’s remind ourselves that that matters. That concerns us, our neighbors, our coworkers.

But also that we, as Mel said, are not cooked here. We are not powerless here. We have a vested interest in the story, and we ourselves are part of the outcome. I say I don’t know how this is going to shape out because I don’t know what you are going to do about it. I don’t know what everyone watching this is going to do about it, but that’s going to determine what the outcome is. And so, again, if anything, we want to leave y’all with that note that this is meant for you, for us to figure out what we do next.

And with that wrapping up the 90 minutes where we’re looking at these key headlines, I wanted to just have 10 minutes of bonus time here so that we could, Mel, take a step back and breathe a bit and address these really great questions that some of our supporters and viewers sent into us that helped us think about how to frame this livestream. In a way we’ve been trying to answer the questions over the past 90 minutes, but I wanted to just toss these out there and get your thoughts — And also what you guys in the live chat think about this.

But one of the key questions that we got from Giovanni R., which was really great, which was, “How much do you estimate this regime will affect what’s left of workers’ benefits and safety standards?” So we started addressing that now, and we’re going to talk about it a little more in a second, but that’s one key question that we’ve been trying to answer here.

Another question that we got from David B., which I think is also really crucial, is David asked, “Will labor only present a front for or a front of resistance and fight back, or is it actually going to push the limits of what we as working class people need and demand? Will labor stop seeing the Democratic Party as the vehicle for that fight back and resistance? Will labor exert itself as if it understands and believes that the laboring class is the sine qua non of production and wealth?” Great question. So much that we could say about there. I want you guys watching to think about that.

And the last question that I wanted to throw up on the screen here, which helped us prepare for this livestream, was from Edward S. And so Edward wrote to us saying, “When will the unions educate their membership about labor history and that the GOP is their foe? It’s atrocious that a huge percent of union members vote for Trump.”

So Mel, I wanted to, now that we’ve gotten through the last 90 minutes, do you feel like there are any other lingering answers to those questions that we didn’t get to, or things that are really sticking in your mind?

Mel Buer:  I think I’ll start with the first one, with Giovanni’s. Maybe we can do a couple of minutes for each one. I think when we talk about how much this regime will affect what’s left of workers’ benefits and safety standards, I think one thing that I’ve learned over the course of my reporting, whether it’s been on OSHA agencies in California, or in the healthcare industry on the West Coast, or the railroad industry in the Midwest, or wherever else, is that oftentimes these agencies can be equipped with the ability to maintain safety standards, to maintain workers’ benefits, and oftentimes there’s no political will to maintain those.

Subsequent administrations may cater to lobbyists, to understaff these agencies, to re-appropriate funds away from these agencies. Just like anything else in the government, you need money to operate. And if you’re being appropriated less and less money each year, that means you’re hiring less and less OSHA inspectors each year. That means there’s less OSHA inspectors to handle the complaints that happen that are called in, and then they start making hard decisions about which ones to investigate and which ones not to — Or it sits on a waiting list, as what happens with the NLRB, where oftentimes, for example, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette complaint was essentially on a waiting list for investigation for over a year because there’s just not enough people who have been tasked with investigating these things.

I think what we’ve been talking about, Max, is there’s a bit of a breakdown in the system itself that perpetuates these problems. Something that happens a lot is that workers see this breakdown in an acute area like the aviation industry, like the agriculture industry, like the healthcare industry, and the fight at their disposal is, for example, I just did reporting in Southern California on the Kaiser health system and mental health professionals who are still on strike after 100 days, who saw these breakdowns in the system that was disproportionately affecting their patients because there weren’t enough people getting hired. And these are critically, acutely mentally ill patients who require regular treatments who aren’t getting that — Illegally so, in the state of California.

And so what they do is they view these as workers’ rights issues, patient issues or workers’ rights issues in the healthcare industry. So what do they have at their disposal? They went on strike. Their contract expired, and they’re not going to get off the picket line until they get one written in stone, in paper, signed by Kaiser, that these conditions will cease being as horrendous as they are because that means that they can take care of their patients better.

So in that sense, subsequent administrations have done something to the effect of deregulating portions of the industry, [and] they create serious problems. The railroad strike happened, almost happened under the Biden administration and was stopped last minute. If you talk to some railroad workers, they aren’t happy about that. They feel like they lost leverage because the Biden administration stepped in at a critical time where he could have said, actually, I don’t have to do this.

So I don’t know, man, I think it’s going to get worse before it gets better. Obviously we are looking down the barrel of four years, at least, of extreme MAGA GOP policies that have their own ideology. Obviously, they have their own plan, and a lot of us are going to get left out in the cold.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Or the heat. I wanted to jump in on that point too, because when I think about what these conditions are going to be for our fellow workers, current generations and future generations, to answer Giovanni’s question, I guess what we would say is what railroad workers told me and Mel when we first started investigating that story years ago. Every single worker we talked to told us the same thing at the top: What you need to understand is this goes way back.

And so, if anything, that’s an argument for why all y’all out there should stop fucking watching mainstream political news, or even independent news junkie stuff that only focuses on bipartisan politics and follows the news cycle of Washington DC, because it rots your brain and you lose the ability to think like a real, regular person.

Now, when you talk to other real, regular working people, you get a better frame on the problems that we’re experiencing. And so when railroad workers are saying, here’s the problem, now here’s how far back this goes, and that’s how far back our memories go because we’ve experienced it, and that is decidedly different from the political election cycle.

And this is something that we’ve been bringing up on our reporting here over and over again, is that Donald Trump, Biden, these last few election cycles have been characterized by a sort of like, what did the previous administration do that the next administration’s blaming them about and overturning? And why are people voting for Trump? Because they’re mad at Biden and his policies. But really what we are talking about here in the political world is that voters are responding every two to four years to a crisis that’s been building for the last 40, 50, 60 years.

And so the cumulative effects of this death by a thousand deregulatory cuts, that is what we’re trying to get a handle on here, because that is the frame you need to have to understand how conditions have gotten this bad and why, as Mel said, they’re probably going to get worse before they get any better. From the air traffic controller staffing shortage to the industrial pollution of communities in sacrifice zones around the country from East Palestine to South Baltimore.

This stuff starts happening in more and more places year after year when unsexy, uninteresting legislation gets passed through, it’s not really a blip on people’s radars when it happens 15 years ago. And then 15 years later, you end up living next to a lake that you can’t swim in that you’ve swam in your whole life. Public policy bioaccumulates. It accumulates in our bodies, it accumulates in our jobs, it accumulates in our communities. It doesn’t all happen overnight.

I guess that’s the point I’m getting at, is that we are still in the process of experiencing and feeling the full weight of decisions that have already been made, that were made in Trump’s last administration and Biden’s last administration and Obama’s administration — And Reagan’s administration. We are still finding out the repercussions of those decisions that have already been made, and we are laying the groundwork for even more impactful decisions to hurt us well into the future.

And that’s why I jumped in when you said that we’ll be left out in the cold, and I said, or even in the heat, because that’s another storyline that we follow here too. What are workers and workers’ rights and labor unions going to do as the climate crisis continues to spiral out of control, which it sure as hell is going to the more we do this drill, baby, drill, pull out of the Paris Climate Accords while LA is burning, western North Carolina is obliterated by hurricanes. We are barreling in the exact opposite direction.

But what makes me think of that example is that I remember when the Supreme Court overturned Biden’s attempt to require workplaces of over 100 people to have COVID vaccine mandates, or for folks who didn’t want to take the vaccine, that they did regular testing. The Supreme Court said that they rejected that order and it was hailed as a victory for the antivax crowd, for the Trump MAGA crowd.

But what you and I saw, Mel, and what we talked about, because we actually read the ruling, was that the Supreme Court said because COVID-19 is a general condition, that it just exists in the world, no one employer can be responsible for implementing these kinds of policies to address it.

And so what they were doing was laying the groundwork for getting employers off scot-free as the climate gets worse, as people are working in hotter conditions, when they’re dying in the summer heat, or they’re breathing in toxic chemicals. And basically, we have set the stage for employers to not be liable for our deaths when they’re putting us regularly at hazard in our working conditions as the climate crisis worsens. That’s what I’m trying to point to is these decisions are going to have ripple effects for generations.

So there are things we can do now, but we have to have a full, clear sense of the problem. And that’s what we’re going to try to keep taking apart and analyzing piecemeal in these livestreams, in our reports. Like I said at the top of this livestream, our goal is to not get overwhelmed by the news cycle, but to practice focus, to use our journalistic tools to give you the information you need to act and not be immobilized and hopeless. And so that’s what we’re working on doing and doing better here.

We really want to hear from you guys, and let us know if we are doing better, if there are things that you’d like us to see, do, people you’d like us to have on, subjects that you really need help breaking down in our team here, not just our journalists, but our incredible whole team of editors, producers, studio technicians, let us be usable to you. Let us know what you need and we will use our skills to try to help.

But ultimately, you are the solution. You are the one who is going to determine with your neighbors, your coworkers, your fellow working people, what happens in the future, what kind of future we are leaving for our children. And so our job here at The Real News is to make sure you’ve got what you need to make change. And we want to hear from you, and we want you to hold us accountable if we are not following through on that.

And so please let us know what you thought of this livestream, let us know what you’d like us to cover in future livestreams, and please keep sending questions so that we can keep answering them better and more directly. Because we’ve got so much to say on it, but ultimately what matters is that we’re saying what you are looking for and need to hear and not just listening to ourselves talk. That’s the goal here. That’s what we at The Real News are here to do.

We are a team that is here for you, and we’re a strong and mighty team. And Mel, I could not be more honored to be on this team with you guys in the back, our whole studio team: Adam, Cam, Dave, Kayla, Jocelyn, James, looking at the live chat, everybody on this team is here to help, and we are here for you, and we really appreciate your support, and we look forward to seeing y’all next Thursday when we go live again.

But until then, please support our work so that we can keep bringing you important coverage and conversations like this. And more important than ever, take care of yourselves and take care of each other. Solidarity forever.

As fires continue to rage in Los Angeles, news of an imminent ceasefire in Gaza are raising hopes across the world. All this comes as Trump is about to enter office, ensuring that the system responsible for these catastrophes will continue. Mehdi Hasan, founder of Zeteo News, and Francesca Fiorentini of “The Bitchuation Room” podcast join The Real News as the world burns, and seems on the edge of an even greater conflagration.

Production: Maximillian Alvarez
Studio Production: David Hebden, Cameron Granadino, Adam Coley

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Welcome to the Real News Network and welcome back to our weekly live stream. You can catch our team here live every Thursday, and you can find us reporting on this channel every week, lifting up the voices and stories of real people on the front lines of struggle around the world and bringing together a diverse, wide array of truth tellers, analysts and fighters for global working class justice. So be sure to subscribe to our channel like this video and share your thoughts with us in the live chat right now. Alright, well, happy New Year and all that 2025 has wasted no time throwing us back into the burning trash heap of history, and we’ve got no time to waste here. So let’s get rolling. We’ve got two powerhouse guests joining us today. Returning to the channel, we’ve got the one and only Francesca Fiorentini, correspondent, comedian, and host of the Situation Room podcast.

Francesca is also the former host and head writer of the Web series News broke on AJ Plus and she hosted the Special Red White and who on M-S-N-B-C. And joining us for the first time, we’ve got the one and only Medi Hassan world renowned broadcaster, former host of the Me Hassan Show on M-S-N-B-C, an author of numerous books including Win Every Argument, which was published in 2023. Medi is also a Guardian US columnist and he is the founder, CEO and editor-in-chief of the Vital News Outlet eo. We’re going to start today’s stream in my home of Southern California where cataclysmic wildfires, which continue to explode in frequency and severity due to the manmade climate crisis, have killed at least 25 people displaced, tens of thousands obliterated entire neighborhoods and scorched wide swaths of the landscape. The entire region was on high alert this week with the National Weather Service warning that a new wave of intense winds could cause explosive fire growth.

But there’s some relief here in the latest reports. According to the New York Times this morning, dangerous winds were subsiding in the Los Angeles area on Thursday, delivering a boost for firefighting efforts, even as frustration grew among displaced residents desperate to return to their neighborhoods. After more than a week of devastating wildfires, nine days after the Blaze is ignited, no timeline has been announced for lifting many evacuation orders that have affected tens of thousands of Southern California residents. The Palisades Fire, the largest in the area, had burned nearly 24,000 acres and was 22% contained as of Thursday morning. According to Cal Fire, the Eaton fire covered more than 14,000 acres and was 55% contained. Now as the fires burn here at home across the world, Palestinians who have somehow managed to evade the civilization erasing fires of Israel’s genocidal assault for the past year and a half are rejoicing at the bombshell news that the bombing may finally end in a stunning development.

As Jeremy Scahill writes at Drop Site News, an agreement on a deal that will halt at least temporarily Israel’s 15 month long genocidal assault on Gaza was announced on Wednesday to scenes of celebration by Palestinians and Gaza. The agreement is divided into three phases, each spanning 42 days, and outline specifics on the first phase, including prisoner swaps, Israeli troop withdrawals, allowances for displaced Palestinians to return to their homes while leaving the details of the ensuing two phases to be determined through future negotiations. The deal will take effect on January 19th. The terms of the agreement being negotiated are nearly identical to what was on the table last May when outgoing President Joe Biden first announced it in his farewell address from the Oval Office last night, president Biden very noticeably tried to take credit for the deal being reached, but reports from inside Israel itself tell a very different story.

The Israeli newspaper Harts reported this week that Israeli sources say that the involvement of the incoming US administration led by Trump’s aggressive Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, revived hostage talks with Hamas. While Netanyahu’s propaganda machine claims that Trump has left him no choice. What happens inside his coalition will determine whether the Prime Minister approves the deal. So what does this all mean for Palestinians and Israelis, for the world and for us working people here in the heart of US Empire? What does that tell us about the legacy of the outgoing Biden administration and about the new international order in the Trump 2.0 era and with Trump’s inauguration just days away, what will next week reveal about what we’re actually facing in the coming four years with a second Trump administration and a fully magnified GOP effectively controlling all branches of government? So to dig into all of this, I want to go to our amazing guest, Medi Hassan and Francesca Fiorentini.

And a quick note to all of you watching live. We’re going to be talking with Medi and Francesca for the next hour, but we’ll be responding to your questions from the live chat in the last half hour of the stream. So if you’ve got thoughts or questions, please share them in the chat. Alright, Francesca, I want to come to you first sis, because you are back home in LA right in the middle of the madness and we’ve been following your social media updates on the wildfires for the past week. And first of all, I really just want to say that I and the whole Real news team have been thinking of you, your friends, your family, and we are sending you all our love and solidarity in these apocalyptic ass times. I want to ask if we can start with having you just lay out what the past week and a half have been like for you, what you want most people who don’t live in SoCal, to know about what you and others there have been seeing, feeling, experiencing, and where do things stand now,

Francesca Fiorentini:

That’s a huge question, but thank you so much for having me back and thank you for yes, all the kind words. And my heart also is going out to all the people who have lost everything. My sister-in-law lost everything and her family, but so many people are in this position and I just want everyone to know that we’re relying on mutual aid and solidarity from communities. That is what is happening. That is who is around right now. People are coming back to their homes, but the air quality is not okay. The A QI doesn’t measure things like toxic chemicals burning from electronics or toys or old homes that might have asbestos in it. There’s no way to measure that. Nobody’s out here telling us how to stay safe, what to do, helping us with air filtration systems, which can often be incredibly expensive. It is all person to person.

It is Facebook mom groups to community organizations that were already on the ground. I actually recently just did a piece for EO specifically about the people who are coming together in this moment to literally save lives. And one of those people are day laborers, migrant day laborers, shout out to the day Laborers Organizing Network and the Pasadena Worker Center. They are organizing day laborers who often have experience in things like landscaping. They know how to handle a chainsaw to get rid of some of this debris that is blocking people’s homes, has fallen on their cars, on and on and on. It is the people, and I hate that. I hate that we only have one another, but also it is a reminder that we are all we have. That push comes to shove. We are woefully unprepared in this country for this kind of climate chaos.

We are woefully unprepared as we were under covid for the kinds of pandemics that will be, again, all too commonplace with our public health infrastructure completely decimated and it’s only going to get worse. So it is really gutting, it is apocalyptic, it is scary, but it is also heartening. And the silver lining is to see some of this solidarity. And I think honestly, people just getting offline stop participating in the conspiracy theories and which again, are really, really running rampant right now. There is a lot more to say about what happens next. I’ll just say that LA has a massive fight on our hands and to me it also plays into the questions that have arisen ever since the 2020 George Floyd uprising about where our money in this city goes. Now, I want to caveat that by saying that no amount of money could have stopped a hundred mile winds spreading embers here and there and just lighting fire after fire after fire.

That is climate change. But on an LA specific level, we have a budget that is out of control, skewed towards the cops. We need to change that. And so many grassroots organizations here have been blowing the whistle. And as our elected officials become more representative, you’ve got a shout out to YIs Hernandez on city council who Soto Martinez also to Naia Ramen and finally recently elected Isabelle Rado. All of them are progressives and three of them who were in office at the time voted against that budget that gave more money to the police than any other place. So there is a national conversation we can also talk about that I’d love to talk about, but that is what’s happening here locally. There’s a fight ahead of us and it is on every front.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And I think that’s beautifully and powerfully put, Francesca, and just to everyone watching not from Southern California, I am sure the images of the Santa Ana winds blowing those embers was quite shocking. They are nothing new to us, but this speed and this late, or I guess this early in the year that is, I remember my own parents being evacuated from their house in 2008 because the Santa S had blown embers over to our side of Brea and the fires were getting close to our home. This happens all the time, but the speed, the intensity, the ferocity, the fact that these winds are blowing this much in January when normally there’s something we expect in the fall like these to say nothing of the mega drought that we’ve been in the southwest for the past 25 years. I mean, there is so much to talk about here.

Francesca Fiorentini:

I’ve only lived here for a few years and I literally don’t know when the Santa Ana winds are supposed to happen every year. It’s like, no, it’s supposed to be in October. No, they’re in August. It’s very funny that no one actually knows when they’re happening. But yes, what hasn’t happened is rain in nine months

Maximillian Alvarez:

And I guess the Santa Ana’s are just year round at this point. So not great folks. And I also want to highlight what you said, Francesca, about just the impact of the diss and misinformation and medi. I want to come to you on this question in a second because it really strikes me as someone who was interviewing folks on the ground in Asheville, North Carolina in the wake of the hurricane a few months ago. They were saying the exact same thing about how Trump’s tweets, about fema far right conspiracy theories about anything immigrants, that it was actively hurting relief efforts and that those relief efforts were largely being driven by mutual aid, by people on the ground. So I want folks to really take that to heart and think about what that means for us as a society that is going to be facing compounding cataclysms more frequently.

Now, medi, I want to bring you in here first to give you a chance to respond to anything that Francesca said there. But also as someone who has worked in the upper echelons of broadcast news, I really want to get your perspective on how the media has responded to these fires from the manufacturer of bullshit. Pseudo stories driven by whatever Trump or Musk said about the fires to the media’s proven unwillingness to report on these environmental disasters in a continuing context of climate change. And actually in a searing piece that we published at The Real News earlier this week by columnist Adam Johnson, Adam points out that a survey of nightly news coverage from the first full day of the LA Fire showed that in 16 minutes of coverage, A-B-C-N-B-C and CBS Nightly News broadcast did not mention climate change once in their Wednesday morning coverage of the LA fires.

Neither the New York Times Daily Podcast nor the New York Times Morning newsletter address climate change at all. Severe weather events when they’re reported on at all, typically because they’re within the US are indexed in the oh deism genre of reporting where politics and human decision-making are stripped away entirely. And all one can do is look on helplessly and say, oh dear, there’s no villain victims, but no victimizer, no political actors or politics at all. And above all, no explicit or implicit call to action just agency free human suffering that may sort of kind of be linked to erratic weather patterns with no sense there’s anything the viewer or reader can actually do about it. It’s just vaguely sad and everyone is expected to chip in a few dollars to GoFundMe gaw at the suffering and move on to the next extreme weather event right around the corner in a matter of weeks. Meam, please, your thoughts on the media response to the California wildfires and your advice for viewers about how we need to navigate this chaotic information ecosystem to get the answers we need in times of emergency.

Mehdi Hasan:

It’s a very troubling time when it comes to media misinformation. I am somebody who believes that most of our issues that we have in society right now do go back to the media, right? I’m one of these people who thinks that we need to have long, hard conversations about the information era that we’re in. I think people on the left have not done that. I think people on the right are enjoying the fact that people on the left haven’t done that. It’s became fashionable for a while to say, oh, you can’t blame the media for everything. Now look, a lot of this comes back to how you get your info. You mentioned earlier about the pseudo manufacturing of bullshit news. Adam’s spot on in his piece about the O ideaism and the idea from liberal media that if you talk about climate change, you’re talking about something political, right?

The right have so successfully turned science into a partisan issue that you no longer can talk about vaccines or climate science or any other obvious undeniable scientific issue without sounding like a liberal or a progressive or a leftist. It’s actually genius on their part that they’ve managed to turn science, objective science into a right left issue. And so of course, the liberal media cowed by the right doesn’t want to touch issues that they think at a time of storms, at a time of tornadoes, at a time of fires. You can’t talk about politics and therefore you can’t talk about climate change because climate change is coded political. And that is the success story that they’ve done on the liberal media side, of course, on the right wing media side, what they have done. And Adam mentions no villain, no victimizer, that’s the liberal view of the world. The right are the masters of understanding the importance of having a villain, right? What they have done so successfully is they’ve tapped into human beings basic psyches, basic fears, and understood that for any political crisis you have to have a bad guy. Democrats have failed to do that. Liberals have consistently failed to do that. The right have rightly understood the need for a villain. Now, the villains they’ve picked are horrible Mexicans, Muslims, trans kids, foreigners,

Maximillian Alvarez:

Immigrants, DI caused the fire

Mehdi Hasan:

DRT, and they apply that model to any crisis. It doesn’t matter what it is. So fires come along. I tweeted this earlier this week. It’s actually kind of admirable from a kind of, if you put your evil genius hat on, you have to admire the ability for the right to turn in a matter of days, some might say hours, an issue of objective, climate change, natural disaster. What do we do about this policy-wise into, no, it’s about the water hydrants and the pressure and the water hydrants and it’s about the number of helicopters. And why don’t we have drones in the skies? And why was Karen Bass in Ghana? And we can go down the list of what they’ve managed to do in terms of empty reservoirs and DEI, firefighters and all of the rest.

Francesca Fiorentini:

Why didn’t they use their weather machines?

Mehdi Hasan:

Why didn’t they use their measurements to control it for good, not evil? And that is actually admirable. I’m sorry. It’s amazing because a lot of people, I think 10 years ago, five years ago would’ve said, wait till climate change starts hitting the us. Wait till people start dying from it, then everyone will be forced to take it seriously. Actually turns out, no, even if you’re losing Americans in front of your eyes, they can make you look elsewhere. That is the power of propaganda. And in the old days, it would’ve been Rupert Murdoch and Fox. Today it is Elon Musk and social media and Mark Zuckerberg and Co and Musk has of course been driving a lot of this. There was that hilarious moment where he asked firefighters about water pressure. They were like, no, we were good on water. But that is the power of propaganda and misinformation.

And I was talking to a colleague earlier about this. We’ve had the right so successfully hijack the debate about media information, say it’s censorship, censorship. And Mark Zuckerberg last week came out and said, censorship, we’re going to get rid of our fact checking. And actually, no, I’m sorry. The debate has to be about content moderation. It has to be about responsible journalism. When people are dying, we can have inane abstract debates about free speech, but people are dying in a pandemic. Yeah, I do want Facebook to take down posts saying, put ivermectin in your body or inject yourself with disinfectant. Yeah, I do want people to be able to say, you know what? In the middle of a hurricane in North Carolina, don’t stay in your home because if you leave the government are going to seize your property, you might die even the local Republican congressman at that time. So I do think when people’s lives are on the lines, it’s very easy to have abstract First Amendment discussions. But in public emergencies, we can’t just have unlimited misinformation and people say, oh, that’s authoritarian. No, it’s how it’s always been

Until very recently when these libertarian freaks pretend that there should be no restrictions on their lies and gaslighting. So look, we need to have hard conversations about all this stuff. The moment Elon bus bought Twitter in 2022, that in itself told us the Democrats and the liberal side of the spectrum were not ready for this fight. The fact that they just rolled over and can you imagine if George Soros next month tried to buy Fox? You think the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress will be like, yeah, free market. Do what you want to do though they would do everything they could to stop it because they understand the power of those platforms. Liberals and leftists have not understood the power of those platforms,

Francesca Fiorentini:

Right? Or the efforts to reign them in move so glacially slowly, although they begin, and that inevitably if you don’t actually break up big tech, it will just get eaten by a bigger and bigger and bigger fish. And I want to just say that just on social media, misinformation and disinformation, it’s truly leading to online vigilantism that is terrifying so that everyone thinks that they are a particular sleuth to find out who started the fires, likely a downed power line. You dumb idiots, everything else that started wildfires here in this state of California. It’s a down power line. Okay? So just to say that it is really getting into a terrifying level of vigilantism and people are using apps to do exactly this. So it’s taking misinformation and applying it in real world and making citizens arrests and things like this.

Mehdi Hasan:

But also just to go back to your original question about what can people do who are not crazy freaks. I think people watching this need to understand that A, don’t play the game, participate in the kind of crap that Francesca highlighted and you’ve highlighted, but also, I mean the death of expertise and respect for expertise. I mean, look, I’m on the fence on this one. Elites have lied to us for a long time. A lot of foreign policy experts got us into Iraq and defended Gaza. But I do worry since the pandemic, when you saw Dr. Fauci became the villain of the right, not Donald Trump, the man who said, put disinfectant in your body, not Republican politicians who refuse to mask or do basic mitigation measures, but Fauci became the villain of the right wing movement. Scientists started going around with bodyguards. People like my friend Peter Hotez in Texas had people turning up at his home to try and film him. I think that is a reminder of there’s a great meme doing the rounds. Last week I was a covid expert This week I’m an expert on water pressure in California.

Speaker 4:

People

Mehdi Hasan:

Log in and overnight everyone on Twitter becomes an expert on whatever the de jore story is. That’s a real problem. Social media is really empowered, and Bill Bird did a great line on Jimmy Kimmel the other night saying some fuckhead in his underwear in his mother’s basement is now suddenly the world’s expert on California water pressure systems like get a grip on everyone, especially in the US where academia is seen as some kind of shadowy force. People are ivory towers are not to be trusted. It is really weird that we don’t go, oh, there’s a crisis about wildfires. Let’s ask the wildfire experts what we should do. There’s a crisis about covid. Let’s ask vaccination experts and disease experts and infectious disease experts watch No in this country. Let’s ask a pundit on cable news. What we should do.

Francesca Fiorentini:

Yeah, I mean there’s a lot to say. I do just want to talk about really quickly, just add to me’s point about a villain and creating villains. And obviously we know that the villain in the LA fire story is the fossil fuel industry, and that is so clear. But there’s a lot of sub villains within that. And right now you’ve got Republicans who are talking about tying aid relief for California to a budget that would enshrine the Donald Trump tax cuts four billionaires into law. So double whammy, quite literally the 1% that gave us these wildfires that giving us these once in a century flood, they’re going to enshrine that 1% even more. So the enemy is the billionaire class, and it is no clearer than when you look at climate chaos and what the billionaire class continues to, but people bring on all of us. Go ahead.

Mehdi Hasan:

Frankly, people just don’t see it, right? This is the problem right now, it’s obvious it’s the billionaire class. It’s obvious it’s the fossil fuel industry, but I’m talking about even apolitical people, not like fox junkies, but such as the power of the social media discussion and the background noise and such as discipline of the right wing media machine and rightwing pundits and rightwing politicians to say the message in unison in a way that Democrats or liberals or leftists don’t, is that today, for example, if you ask people, oh, California, was it really bad? Should there be condition? I think the average person would say, yeah, yeah, but what about Texas? It’s mismanaged. What about Texas? I don’t hear the same. We don’t talk about Texas in the same way. Max mentioned at the start, 25 people are dead. That’s 25. Too many. I’m sure that death hole’s going to go up in Texas. 250 people is the government’s death to 700 is the unofficial death toll from the slow storms. A couple of years back when Ted Cruz fled to Cancun, right when the Texas power grid shut down, there were no consequences from that. No one talks about tying aid or conditions for Texas. There were no political people like Karen Bass’s career is over. Greg Abbott got reelected after that. Ted Cruz got reelected after that. Why? Because again, liberals in the left are not very good at creating villains in the same way that the right does

Francesca Fiorentini:

Because they often receive money from the exact same class that the right does. I mean, we have villains set out before us. Look, the fact is the matter is that 10 years ago we didn’t have names like Elon Musk or Mark Andreessen or Sam Altman or whomever else, other billionaires who were in the rooms with Donald Trump. We didn’t have those names. The income disparity was already concentrating, but we didn’t have the names.

Mehdi Hasan:

Now

Francesca Fiorentini:

We’ve got literal names. These emblems of late stage

Mehdi Hasan:

Capitalism, they’re literally going to be sitting on stage next week in the inauguration.

Francesca Fiorentini:

Yes. And we still can’t name them. And I just want to say Democrats are not off the cuff here. I just want to shout out that the Lever had an incredible report about how the California Insurance Commissioner, who oversees fire insurance in this state has received contributions from the insurance industry and is currently in 2023, passed a reform that would allow the buck to be passed to consumers versus the insurance agency because insurers are leaving California, we all know this. They’re leaving Florida, they’re leaving everywhere, and instead they’re

Mehdi Hasan:

Not leaving Florida. Florida is a perfect place in America. What are you talking about?

Francesca Fiorentini:

Well, actually, ironically, Florida has more checks and balances looking at the insurance industry there than in California. So all to say Ricardo Lara is his name. He’s going to be throughout LA if you see him and if he’s giving you a good information, great, alright, but also he has taken money from the insurance industry to specifically pass reforms that would make consumers premiums go up and let them off easy. They would have to do very, very little. They have to try to cover people for two years, 5% more coverage. But if it gets too expensive, they’re going to leave. Meanwhile, they’re literally hiring private firefighting forces that are protecting the buildings that they insure to say nothing of the Republicans like Rick Caruso, who also hired private firefighters to protect his property and wants to be mayor. So again, it always gets worse and we are going to see that come Monday how all of this is going to get worse.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And just to add one more thing there on just how absurd this entire situation is and how villainous it is, and then I want us to kind of pivot and talk about Gaza here in the next half hour. But my colleague Dave Zin was talking to us about this earlier this week. It’s like the Monday night football game that the Rams were playing was supposed to take place in Los Angeles. It got moved to Arizona. Everyone on the media, in the sports media was talking about, oh, what a great effort it was to move this game to the State Farm Stadium in Arizona when State Farm are the pieces of shit who just revoked a bunch of people’s home insurance a month ago before these fires. It is absolute madness. And one more point I wanted to make because me, you mentioned the need for expertise and verifiable information and authoritative information.

I want to also compliment that with information and firsthand accounts and stories and human faces of the working people who are being affected by this. And that is what we do here at The Real News. I remember when the Baltimore Bridge collapsed last year and all these same pieces of shit were on right wing media saying, oh, it was DEI that caused the mismanagement here. That collapsed the bridge. I was there talking to the immigrant workers who were coworkers of the men who died on that bridge. I was talking to longshore workers about how the shipping industry has made these container ships bigger, filled with more dangerous materials. Two to 3% of them are only abiding by US port regulations. The others are flags of convenience ships. Like we’re not talking about that. Instead, people are running around talking about bullshit like DEI. The same way that I was talking to folks in Asheville who were dealing with the effects of that hurricane the same way I talked to folks who were living near Eagle Pass in Texas who had a bunch of right wing idiots show up in their town and cause more disruption than the undocumented immigrants who were supposedly crossing the border.

But then all these right-wing nut jobs got there and there was no one there. I mean, I want folks East Palestinian, Ohio where the train derailed. I’ve been there multiple times. I’ve interviewed countless people from that community Immediately once that train derailed and those people’s lives were turned upside down and they are still sick, they are still suffering. I talk to them every week. It was a media circus over who’s more to blame for this Trump or Biden, who’s going to get there first? Trump or Biden. Everyone just cares about that. And then they stopped caring about the people who were right at the center of it. And that includes you and me and any one of us who are in line to suffer this kind of catastrophe in the future. And sadly, there are going to be more of them whether they’re caused by industrial accidents, climate change, what have you.

Mehdi Hasan:

Yeah.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Oh, please.

Mehdi Hasan:

What you’re saying is we didn’t do enough coverage of James Woods’s house. Almost burning down what you’re saying, the real

Maximillian Alvarez:

Story. Yes. I’m saying my heart bleeds certainly for James Woods, but I will say on that note that I am deeply disappointed in so many people on the so-called progressive left who were talking about my home southern California as if these fires only burned James Woods’s house and that they were something to be celebrated when I’m seeing people who are being displaced who live in homes that they couldn’t afford to buy now, but maybe they’ve been there for a generation and the property values have gone up. So they’re not all these rich people that you’re pretending like are sympathetic characters

Mehdi Hasan:

Conversation perhaps for another day. But having worked at M-S-N-B-C and seen CNN how it goes, I say this as someone who moved to the US from another country, there’s also an east coast bias with our media, right? The West Coast is another country for people in New York and DC LA is not the same value, important status. I think I saw something a week ago in the midst of all the LA Fires houses destroyed 27,000 acres. I think apartment block was on fire in New York and it was live footage suddenly from this one building in New York on fire. And that’s always going to be the case. One building in New York will always get more coverage in the entire city outside of the east coast. And there is that longstanding problem, bipartisan problem. Forget right or left, there is east coast bias amongst our media. That’s the

Francesca Fiorentini:

Fact. Yeah, for sure. And also just really quickly, I mean, I was tuning into local news for the first time in a real ever because you’re watching local news and you’re like, oh, okay, obviously I’m using my husband’s family’s login to get to the log. That’s

Mehdi Hasan:

What good news was made for fire trucks, things on fire,

Francesca Fiorentini:

But right, but exactly. But again, a lot of people have, don’t have cable or don’t just don’t have their TV set up or whatever, only doing streaming. And so then for breaking news, and this is why the ownership of Twitter is incredibly important. They are going to Twitter. And if you’re not doing any fact checking on social media, then we are so

Mehdi Hasan:

Far, Twitter used to be a great place in a crisis. Now it’s the worst place in a

Francesca Fiorentini:

Crisis. Yes.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Speaking of terrible places, I want to turn our eyes to the other side of the world where we have been watching one of the greatest crimes of humanity unfold over the past year and a half on platforms like Twitter. I want to turn to Gaza and Israel, where as of right now, there is both hope and trepidation about whether or not this truce deal reached this week will actually be accepted and implemented by Israel. The Associated Press reported just this morning, a last minute crisis with Hamas holding up Israeli approval of a long awaited agreement to pause the fighting in the Gaza strip and release dozens of hostages. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Thursday. Meanwhile, Israeli airstrikes killed dozens of people across the war ravage territory. The Israeli cabinet was expected to vote on the deal Thursday, but Netanyahu’s office said they won’t meet until Hamas backs down accusing it of reneging on parts of the agreement in an attempt to gain further concessions.

Without elaborating on that, a senior Hamas official said, the group is committed to the agreement announced by the mediators medi. I want to come back to you here and then Francesca, please hop in after we still don’t know if this ceasefire deal will take effect as planned this Sunday. The next 72 hours are going to be very critical and very intense. But if the deal does take effect, what will this mean and what will it not mean for Gaza, for Palestinians and for Israel and Israeli society? And that is the single most important question right now. So only once we’ve all addressed that, then let’s talk about what these developments tell us about the legacy of Biden’s administration and what the hell we can expect in geopolitics and the Trump 2.0 era.

Mehdi Hasan:

I mean, they’re interlinked in the sense that I’m thoroughly cynical about everything that happens in the Middle East, and I’m very cynical about the Israeli government because they’re a group of very cynical people and all American negotiators, whether the Democrats or Republicans don’t have the best interests of the people at Gaza at hand. Let’s be honest about that. Look, if this is real in any shape or form, even in a temporary form, that’s a good thing. Because even if you get an hour where a bomb stop falling, that is some kind of relief for one of the most depressed peoples on earth. The Palestinians of Gaza who spent the last 16th months being Genocided, right? Having their capacity to continue living existing, destroyed in front of our eyes, live streamed to us as the Irish lawyer for the South African government said exactly a year ago at the ICJ, this is the first genocide where people are live streaming their own genocide, begging for help from the rest of the world.

And a year later, here we are with no change. So if we’ve even got an hour of a pause, I’ll take it and Palestinian and Gaza will take it. Now, that doesn’t mean though we have to start celebrating and cheering and suggesting that there’s peace in the Middle East, peace in our time. That’s bullshit. And I’m very skeptical about this deal, not just because Netanyahu today said they’re not going to vote on it, not just because Ben Vere his far right terrorist, convicted terrorist. National Security Minister has threatened to resign if the deal goes through, and that means the Netanyahu government would fall and Netanyahu is all about self-preservation. But separate to that, just look at the deal itself. A, it’s the exact same deal that was on the table in May of last year that the Israelis rejected, but the Americans lied and said, Hamas rejected be.

It involves three phases, right? 42 days for the first phase, 42 days for the second phase. It’s really the second and third phases where the actual long-term impact of this kicks in, in terms of withdrawal of Israeli forces, in terms of any kind of humanitarian reconstruction. Those two phases, a lot of people are saying, we will never get to, right? Netanya is only interested in phase one if we even get to phase one where you do a limited release of prisoners and then he goes back to bombing net. Neil has made it very clear that he’s not going to stop the war. He doesn’t want to stop the war, and that’s why he’s never been interested in a ceasefire. He’s only interested in pauses. So some people spent the last 24 hours attacking me on social media because I was one of the people who said, Trump will be worse on Gaza than Biden.

So there’s a lot of gotcha moments going on right now said, well, look, Trump was better. He did it in 24 hours. What Biden couldn’t do in a year, I would say, let’s wait and see. Right? I’m old enough to know that Donald Trump is not what you think is not what you see. And people who have celebrated Donald Trump early tend to find egg on their faces. So I hope I’m wrong. I hope that in a year’s time or six months time, people will say, Mary, you were wrong. Donald Trump was much better for the people of Gaza than Joe Biden, but the man is not even president yet. Please stop the premature celebrations. Let’s see if this ceasefire happens on the Sunday. Let’s see if it holds. Let’s see if it actually delivers peace. Let’s see if we get any kind of reconstruction, because stopping the bombs is only one part of it.

Garzas cannot continue to exist in a place that is uninhabitable, which groups experts say will take, what, 80 years to rebuild 42 million tons of rubble. So I want to see what happens first. Already today, we’ve seen Donald Trump’s incoming National Security Advisor, waltz, Michael Waltz, I think his name is saying that we support Israel’s right to go back into Gaza whenever they like. We’ve seen Marco Rubio, who’s going to be the Secretary of State saying he’s going to lift all sanctions on the settlers that Joe Biden brought in the limited sanctions on the limited far right settlers. So this is far from done, the people who think it’s all done now of being very naive and have learned nothing from the first four years of Trump. But look, having said all that, I know you want to get into it a bit. Clearly Trump’s done more than Biden in the last week in terms of applying pressure. That’s undeniable. And it’s embarrassing for Joe Biden and the Democrats that that’s the case.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah, I mean, think, oh, Francesca, please hop in.

Francesca Fiorentini:

No, no, no, go ahead.

Maximillian Alvarez:

No, I was just going to say, I think everyone is rushing to do the thing we were just talking about in la, right? It is like rushing to have a take on what’s happening while it’s still unfolding, and we don’t know what’s going to happen. And so I think everyone, especially on the MAGA Trump side, is trying to kind of sell this as a Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan hostage kind of moment before we even know if the deal’s going to be accepted.

Mehdi Hasan:

Well, it simply, you mentioned the hostage Treasury because of course in 1968 you had Nixon, Vietnam, and Kissinger. We discover later that Kissinger was treacherous and was passing messages to the Vietnamese saying, we’ll do a better deal. Don’t stop the war now. And many more Americans and Vietnamese, of course, and Cambodians and lotions died because of that. We know that in 1980 now, and there’s a great new book from Craig Unger on this that Jimmy Carter was very close to getting the hostages out of Iran, but Ronald Reagan said to Iranians, don’t do it. I’ll give you a better deal and I’ll get you weapons. And this may be the third time that happened. We know that Netanyahu and Trump met at Mar-a-Lago last year. We don’t know what was discussed, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Trump said, make sure you hold off till I’m office.

So I get the credit. We know Trump doesn’t give a shit about Palestinian life. It’s all about his ego and showing that he is a deal maker. He’s a successful president. He wanted this done by January the 20th. By the way, it’s not going to be done by January the 20th. Can I just point that out? Everyone? I love the way we grade Donald Trump on a curve, even the left grades Donald Trump on a curve. He literally said he wanted all the hostages released by January. There won’t be hostages won’t be released by January the 20th. The deal only begins on the 19th. So this is the man who also said he would end the Ukraine War in 24 hours. Right? Good luck with that. Apparently it’s going to be over on Monday night. So this is the kind of bullshit that unfortunately left us to have allowed Trump to be graded on a curve about. And like I said, I hope to be proved wrong, but to say that I’m wrong right now, or that those of us who warned against Trump on the issue of Gaza are wrong because there’s this ceasefire deal that hasn’t been even implemented or voted on by the Israelis yet. Calm the F down.

Francesca Fiorentini:

Yeah, no, I 100% agree, but I will say I was surprised when I heard it came through. I was like, oh, completely shocked. And it’s amazing that Netanyahu hasn’t even agreed to it, that it hasn’t even gone forward. But the narrative of Trump got a ceasefire is already out there. Right. And again, messaging, right, what we talked about earlier, they masters. Exactly. Exactly. I mean, it’s the kind of the Bill bar. There was no collusion headline. Everyone was like, oh, okay. There was no collusion and that made it. That’s the headline. And so Trump got this, but again, I was reacting to it sort of in real time on my show, and I was like, damn, it really does. And here’s the thing we need to be very careful about, not as Nora Kott lawyer, a Palestinian lawyer, awesome academic said, don’t give Trump any flowers on this. It is really a revelation of Joe Biden and the inability to actually get a ceasefire after the professing of working round the clock. I mean, I think maybe the differences between the Nixon and the Carter examples medi is that I don’t know if Joe Biden really was working on a ceasefire around the clock. I mean, I don’t think he was actually invested.

Mehdi Hasan:

He certainly didn’t apply pressure. I mean, this is the deal, to be fair to Biden, this is the deal that they put on the table that the American,

Francesca Fiorentini:

Yes,

Mehdi Hasan:

He never applied the pressure. I wrote my first column for The Guardian last February, and it was a column about how Ronald Reagan called man be in 1982 when the Israelis were Besieging Beirut. He saw a child on TV with no arms. He rang be and said, this is a Holocaust. And be said, how dare you use the word Holocaust, but no one called Reagan and Antisi in those days. You could say that. He said, this is a Holocaust. You need to stop this now in 20 minutes. The Israelis stopped bombing Beirut. I said, at the time, in February of 2024, Biden can make a phone call and end this genocide. The very serious people, the very savvy, smart people. Oh, no, it’s not that simple. You can’t do that. Actually, you can, right? Steve Witkoff went to Israel and said to Netanyahu, it’s got to be done in time.

I don’t care if you’re on a holiday, but look, how much of it was pressure, how much of it was mutually beneficial behavior by Netanya and Trump? We don’t know yet. The thing about Trump is half the things come out in memoirs and books. We have reporters sitting on stories that they write about in bestselling books like a year later. You’re like, why didn’t you tell us that at the time? How many New York Times and Washington Boast and Politico reporters have done that? So I would like to hear what happened at Mar-a-Lago last year. I would like to hear what was actually said between Witkoff and Netanya. How much of it was pressure and Netanyahu’s arm being twisted? How much of it was Netanyahu and Woff and Trump saying, this is good. We’ll make it look like you pressured me into this because it’s mutually beneficial for it to happen this way.

Francesca Fiorentini:

Sure. And obviously, who knows the back deals that were promised around the West Bank and annexation and the Miria Adelson money and all that,

Mehdi Hasan:

The Israeli press called a gift bank. Francesca, they’ve said that Trump gave

Maximillian Alvarez:

Lifting sanctions on Pegasus, which could come in very handy for an authoritarian regime. Yeah, I mean, I think, again, a lot of these details are going to come out in the wash, but I think one distinction that came up in the great interview that Jeremy Scahill did on Drop Site news yesterday with Palestinians reacting to the news was a sort of distinction that when it comes to Biden, he’s very merits ideological in this regard. Like he’s expressed himself as a full fledged Zionist who wants his legacy or wanted his legacy to kind of be pegged to standing with Israel. Whereas Trump’s is more transactional, and this guy’s got a whole lot of things he wants to do right here. He’s seen how much Gaza has tanked. Biden’s administration hampered that administration. He doesn’t want have to deal with that. I do think that’s a useful distinction while, but I wanted to ask what you guys said.

Mehdi Hasan:

Can I just jump in very briefly, just push back a little bit. I hear that that Trump is transactional. The implication of that is that there is some consistent strategy to what Trump says or does. I refuse to accept that Trump is only consistently inconsistent. So okay, he’s transactional in the sense that he’s a businessman. He likes to make money for him and his kids. He likes to do deals and wrote books about it and sees himself as a dealmaker. I get that. But in actual reality, the man is a narcissist. He’s a dumbass, he’s an ignoramus. He’s a vain, thin-skinned little man. And the idea that people can’t manipulate him, he is absurd. He’s the most easily manipulated politician of our lifetime. So when people say, oh, well, he’s transactional, he’s not an ideological Zion. Even if I accept all that, which I’m not sure I do, he’s surrounded by people who are, you’re telling me that Marco Rubio, and as I say, Michael Waltz, and what about Mike, Mike Huckabee Huckabee now who says there’s no such thing as Palestinians.

There’s no such thing as a West Bank. I just want to know what’s Mike Huckabee thinking for the last 48 hours? He’s okay with this. Clearly stuff has been going on behind the scenes that we don’t know about. There is long-term ramifications that we don’t know about, and I think we have to really be skeptical of this idea that somehow Donald Trump’s going to just do deals with the Saudis and the Turks and the Qataris, and that’s why he’s different to Biden. Who’s this lifelong Zionist? No, I mean, first of all, he’s not even fricking president yet. We’ve got four years of shit coming down the line. Talk to me at the end of four years, if at the end of four years, Palestinians are free, if at the end of four years Iran hasn’t been bombed, if at the end of four years there isn’t another genocide in Yemen, then fine. I’ll be the first to come on here and say, I was a hundred percent wrong about Trump. But come on, if we learn nothing from the first Trump term,

Francesca Fiorentini:

I mean, I think transactional can be taken in two different ways. Transactional, it sounds like diplomacy, but I think when people say it right, when people say it, it’s more like anything for flattery. And to me, I think he is able to read the room, I think, and there’s a line from one of his rallies over the last year that really stuck with me where he said, he goes, well, and Biden, he’s terrible on Israel. He hates Israel, hates the Jews. He was basically trying to, he does the brow beating of Jewish voters. So he was saying he hates Jews, but I guess he hates Palestinians a little bit more. And there was a smile, and I was like that because even he knew what he was saying was bullshit, and that actually Biden is helping genocide the Palestinian people. And there was that smirk as he understood that all of the Democratic voters that now you got Paul proves that so many people voted on Gaza.

Mehdi Hasan:

I mean, in that sense, he’s an evil genius. The man is both an Ior Aus and an evil genius. I mean, he went to Dearborn, Michigan, which Biden didn’t dare to go to Kamala Harris didn’t dare to go to, he went to Dearborn, Michigan and said, I am a peacemaker. I will bring peace to the Middle East. Liz Cheney will get Muslims killed. Don’t listen to Liz and Kamala. I’m the peacemaker, right? And people lapped it up, which is nonsense. Go back and look at Trump’s first term again. I know Americans have the memory of a goldfish. The guy increased bombing in Iraq, bombed Syria, increased drone strikes in Pakistan, and Somalia helped MBS genocide. Yemen, except I can go through the whole record. The idea that Donald Trump was some kind of anti-war anti interventionist candidate is a complete myth. But again, as you pointed out with the Bill Barr report, he’s transactional. He didn’t collude with Russia. He’s a master of getting these one line narratives about himself out there, which somehow people stick to. He’s Teflon Don,

Francesca Fiorentini:

And it’s more than him. I mean, I think medi that it is this desire for a demagogue to just take the reins. And I think everyone has that. I mean, I’d load to think that I would have that in, but there is even liberals or liberal media, there’s like, Hey, maybe he’s such an idiot. He’s smart there,

Mehdi Hasan:

Strong man. I mean, I spoke to No Gaana Paul yesterday in our live town hall as aeo, the Israeli journalists, and she said, look, even Israeli leftist politicians are buying into this idea that he was a strong man who came in and just beat up Netanyahu and made him do it. And she didn’t buy that narrative either. But even leftists, see that. And by the way, one thing I would say about the American left is what I’ve seen over the last few days and during the election campaign, is in the desperate desire to kick Joe Biden, which I totally get and understand, I’ve got a piece coming out in about 10 minutes on Joe Biden’s awful legacy on Gaza. The problem is where I split with some of my fellow leftists in America is this idea that in order to do Biden down, you have to promote Trump.

This idea that Trump is, I can be very critical of everything Biden did without drinking Kool-Aid about Donald Trump. And that is what Im seeing now in the last few days. The reason why we’re seeing the narrative of Trump, the peacemaker, Trump did this cease. It’s not just the right pushing. There’s a lot of people on the left trying to attack Biden by saying, look, Trump did what you couldn’t do. And I get all that, but that only helps the Trump narrative. Like I said, we don’t know the backstory to the ceasefire deal yet. I don’t know if it’s real. I don’t know if Trump went and twisted Benjamin net Neo’s arm and made him do something he didn’t want to do. We don’t know what was offered in return. We don’t know what the long-term consequences are for Gaza and the West Bank, but they’re again, graded on a curve. It’s not just the right and liberal media that grade Trump on a curve. I think progressives do it too, because we are understandably so frustrated with the Democrats

Francesca Fiorentini:

That

Mehdi Hasan:

We give Republicans a pass on things we wouldn’t give Democrats a pass on.

Francesca Fiorentini:

Yeah, I agree with that. I think we’re trying

Mehdi Hasan:

To cajole anti the entire establishment.

Francesca Fiorentini:

I think there’s a desperation to cajole the liberal, whatever the Democratic leadership to be like, see what a little bit of backbone

Speaker 4:

Might

Francesca Fiorentini:

Get, which is fair that I think. But you’re right. There’s a slippery slope there, and absolutely it can play into the same. Trump did a thing narrative that we know is bullshit.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Right? And I want to make one point and then throw one more question before we got to let Medi go. I know you only got a couple more minutes, man, but I would point people to a very instructive interview that I did with Sarah Nelson, the president of the Flight Attendants Union, who famously became a household named six years ago in the midst of the longest government shutdown, led by Trump in the GOP ostensibly to secure billions of dollars for his stupid southern border wall. And the government was shut down for 35 days, 400,000 federal workers went to work during that entire time without pay. And it was this high stakes game of political brinkmanship as every government shut down inevitably is. But Sarah, I had Sarah on and asked her what we could learn from that moment, from that struggle going into the next four years.

And I think she really rightly pointed out something that I want to introduce to the conversation that we’re having right now, which is we are going to get trapped in this kind of same bipartisan bullshit cycle if those are the only two terms that we have to define our political values, our struggle are the things that we’re actually fighting for. Whereas Sarah rightly pointed out that even though Trump is coming and we are going to have to be on the defensive, we’re going to have to come to the aid of our immigrant neighbors, our trans and GBTQ folks, neighbors. Everybody who is under attack needs to be protected. But if we are just responding to the Trumpian news cycle, we are not fighting for the working class with principal consistency and with strategy. And Sarah, I would again point people to that interview. I’m not going to go into it all now, but really listen to what she’s saying and take to heart what that’s going to mean going into these next four years, and how we have to define our terms as a class, a global working class, and what we need and who’s getting in the way of it, Democrat, republican, whatever, and keep fighting consistently for what we need.

And in that vein, looking ahead at the next four years, with the last few minutes we’ve got Medi, I wanted to ask you both if we could look ahead to next week’s inauguration, sticking with this theme of geopolitics and international relations in the Trump 2.0 era. And as I said before, friend, you’ve been talking about this quite a lot, and I really appreciate it and medi you as well. So let’s talk about first the Trump effect has impacted countries around the world from Argentina to El Salvador, Italy, India, Brazil, over the past eight years since Trump was first elected. And let’s help our viewers understand this global right word shift that is really happening here. What does it mean for instance, that Trump has invited far right leaders to attend his inauguration, like President Na Bke from El Salvador,

Speaker 4:

Argentinian,

Maximillian Alvarez:

President Javier Malay, Victor Orban, prime Minister of Hungary and Italian Prime Minister Georgia Maloney, and that some like Malay are actually going to be there on Monday. Medi, please hop in.

Mehdi Hasan:

So I’m glad you mentioned this. I mean, I’ve been tearing my hair out for almost a decade now, trying to point out that this isn’t just about Donald Trump in the United States. This is a global phenomenon. You can’t understand it in isolation, but you do need to understand that Donald Trump, because by virtue of the US being the US, is the symbol of it, is the leader of it, is the inspiration for it is the guiding star for it sets the benchmark for it. So whether you’re Narendra Modi in India, or Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, or Erdogan in Turkey, or Orban in Hungary, or Putin in Russia, or Lapan in France, or Farage in the uk, go down the list, Malay in Argentina, Bolsonaro in Brazil, they look to the United States for inspiration. They see what Trump gets away with. They try and do the same, and it’s remarkable. I used to do a show for Al Jazeera English called Upfront, a weekly show where I interviewed politicians around the world. One thing I noticed in 20 17, 20 18 20 19 was the politicians I was interviewing from Africa and Asia all started sounding like Trump. They were all saying the same. They were literally echoing. Why not? Why wouldn’t they look at America? They go worked in the us, why can’t we do here?

Francesca Fiorentini:

Didn’t do Ter say fake news. Wasn’t that his,

Mehdi Hasan:

All of those lines, fake news and all of that stuff about enemy of the people and all just downright lying about what’s in front of your eyes. All of that. I started noticing in interviews I was doing with politicians around the world. That is the Trump effect globally. And that’s why it was so important to try and stop Trump from coming back to office, not just for the United States, but because of the symbol and the message it sends around the world because of the power of this networking. When people talk about domestic extremism, it’s not domestic, it’s transnational, right? White supremacy, supremacy of all forms, racism, fascism is transnational. It is very global. We are seeing liberal democracy on the decline in the retreat and migrants and Muslims especially demonized across the Western world. So it is really important to pay attention to all these connections and see who Donald Trump is sponsoring and propping up and understanding that this is a common struggle wherever you are in the world.

And to go back to your point about Sarah Nelson, I would tie that into here to make a final point, which is we have to stick with our principles, right? That is what’s key. What worries me now is in an age of social media, we’re very cultish. We are very partisan. And that’s not just the right, the right, they’re way out there, but the left liberals, progressive centris, are not immune to the online disease of cultism and partisanship, right? This idea of politics as a football game, I support my team, not your team, and I’ll turn a blind eye to my team’s successes as long as I’m attacking your team. That’s a problem, right? Politics is not about personalities, it’s about issues, it’s about principles. I think that is the only way we get through this era. I went on Blue sky yesterday and I saw a long list of prominent liberals saying, thank you, Mr.

President, for getting this ceasefire deal. What? That’s as bad as the MAGA people saying, Donald Trump is peace of our times, right? We got to get away from this idea of holding up politicians or political parties and saying, I support them. No, no, no, no. You support principles and if they’re in line with your principles than you get behind them. And I think that is what we’ve forgotten. And social media is making much, much worse by kind of treating everything as a kind of putting you in your echo chamber, putting you in your tribal bubble. And if we’re going to survive the Trump era, if we’re going to survive fascism, we have to stick to principles, not people and politicians.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And Fran, real

Francesca Fiorentini:

Quick, before you hop in

Maximillian Alvarez:

Credit for wanted,

Francesca Fiorentini:

Is that what I’m hearing? I think that’s what I’m hearing. Many.

Mehdi Hasan:

Exactly. He is the Mandela of our,

Maximillian Alvarez:

And I just wanted to hop in because Medi, I know you’ve got to go, but I wanted to really, really encourage everyone watching. If you are not already, please go support eo. Thank you Medi. Can you please let folks know what you guys are doing, what you got coming up, and where folks can find you.

Mehdi Hasan:

So we have got a lot going on right now. xeo.com, ZETE o.com is our place come do support or subscribers. We’ve got some amazing documentaries coming out on Gaza and Palestine very soon. We’re rolling out some amazing new contributors next week, many of whom viewers of your shows will know. We’ve already got some great contributors like Naomi Klein and Baam EF and Owen Jones already in our stable, but we’re adding to that for the Trump era. And we have a wonderful podcast that just won an award. We are not kidding. So we are doing a lot. We appreciate your support and we appreciate the plug.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Appreciate the work that you do, brother. It’s an honor to be in the struggle with you and I’ll see you on the other side, man. Thank you for joining us. Thanks for having me on.

Francesca Fiorentini:

Bye man. Bye-bye.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright, Francesca Fiorentini, I’m dying to hear your thoughts on the Trump effect over the last eight years and how this is all coming to a head in his inauguration next week with potentially a lot of foreign diplomats and even heads of state showing up from the global populist, right?

Francesca Fiorentini:

Yeah, I mean it’s chilling and it also, I think to Sarah Nelson’s point, and I’m really glad you brought that up. I think we need to have fighters on every single flank, I don’t know, war terminology, but on every single battlefield. So there have to be people who are pushing against the barrage of misinformation that’s going to be coming from Donald Trump. There have to be people fact checking. There have to be people pushing back on these narratives. There have to be people who are watching what he does and what his administration is doing. That’s going to be critical. But for so much of our sanity, we need to be building. We have got to build. And that can even be with your neighbors. It can be with your community members and your schools and your churches and your synagogues and whatever it is. We have to create spaces of real, again, mutual aid and solidarity.

It’s the only way we are going to sort of mentally survive, but also physically, quite literally as we’re talking about LA fires and people surviving thanks to the goodwill of their neighbors and their communities, we need to make sure that locally, that locally we’re electing the right kinds of folks, that we are holding people to account that we’re pressuring Karen Bass and Gavin Newsom, but from the left that we have again, these amazing new progressive leftist city council members that can be the next generation that so many Democrats have fought so hard, whether it’s the squad nationally or on a local level to make sure that progressive stay out of politics. So I super agree with Sarah that I hate the reactive doom loop that we can get into. One thing, and I don’t want to knock it, but one thing that people on the left do often is look at right wing news outlets and right wing influencers and sort of make fun of them.

And I do think it’s important, but sometimes I think about the world upside down. Imagine if right now there were right wingers who watched everything we said, and then they made clips and videos based on the outlandish things. We said, we need a green new deal. And I’m like, that’s power. I’m tired of giving right wing mouthpieces more power by highlighting their bullshit. I’m like, what are we building? What are the scary things we’re singing? What are the real socialist plans that we are creating and enacting? You know what I’m absolutely for defund the police. Fuck yeah, let’s talk about it. Let’s enact it. The right says we did. No, we didn’t. So these are the kinds of things that I’m interested in building and on my show habitation room, having activist organizers, thinkers who can build that now to Trump’s global fascism. I got to say it’s not just, I don’t want to give Trump too much credit because you look at someone like naive B and you’re like, this dude is his own little creation like El Salvador who has basically consolidated power, political power in his country.

He was able to break through the two party system of, I mean it was mostly a two party system by just demagoguing them, saying, turning on them and using his own independence. I think as a weapon and as sort of a badge of honor, which a lot of people are responding to and has now enacted sort of this scorched earth incarcerate first policy on the communities of El Salvador. And depending on who you ask, many El Salvador are very on board for it and very okay with it because they think it’s cleaned up the streets. Nevermind what happens 10 years later, nevermind when people have been incarcerated for decades. There’s no job opportunities when they come back. Nothing’s improved in the economy in El Salvador, right? But it is fascinating because this little crypto king demagogue is, I mean the Trump Jr came to his inauguration. So did Matt Gaetz came to the naive inauguration. What the hell? So the US is actually looking at countries like El Salvador, like Israel, the countries where we’ve propped up their militaries, we’ve assisted with their genocides and saying, what can we learn? We want to build walls here. We want to lock people up indiscriminately here in the us. I think there is a scary authoritarian symbiosis happening between these figures.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I want to talk about this a little bit more in the last half hour that we’ve got, and I’m going to circle back to it in a sec. But I wanted to let you all know watching live that we’ve got Francesca sister Fran on for the next half hour. Brother Meti had to hop off, but we are here to answer your questions or respond to your comments. So I’m going to be throwing some of those up on the screen in a second. So please, if you’ve got questions for Fran or for me, please throw them up there and we’ll tackle them as many of them as we can get to in the next half hour. But a note on the naive B thing, Francesca, because we’ve got a real problem on our hands here. And again, I appreciate the hell out of you for actually being like one of those prominent voices who is talking about this regularly and getting people, your audience to think about the world beyond our own individual scope. Think about the world outside of the US borders, and in fact, it would tell you a lot about what’s happening here as well.

But we’ve also reported on what’s happening in El Salvador. We had a really powerful video report published by the great Latin American based journalist, Mike Fox from El Salvador s

Francesca Fiorentini:

Such a good podcast. Everyone should listen to it. Tell me the name of it again, remind people.

Maximillian Alvarez:

So the one that we put out last year was called Under the Shadow, which was an incredible podcast series that I would highly encourage everyone who’s listening or watching this go binge that whole series. And also listen to Mike’s previous series, which we produced with him in partnership with Nala, the North American Congress on Latin America called Brazil on fire, specifically go find the episode near the end of Brazil on fire where Mike investigates the rise of the evangelical right in Brazil and talks about how this right wing evangelical pro Bolsonaro group is pretty much saying what the evangelical nut jobs here are saying about Trump. So if you want to look at that Trump effect, if you want to hear it in audio form, it’s there in Mike’s podcast, Brazil on fire and a lot more is there in his podcast that we ran last year under the shadow.

But also to circle back to naive Bke and El Salvador, we published a standalone documentary report that Mike did there about b’s dragnet arrest, first sweeps. We talked to family members of those who have been disappeared in these sweeps who are completely innocent, but maybe they got tattoos, maybe they’ve been accused of being affiliated by a gang or maybe they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. But this is the real problem that I wanted to get your thoughts on. Fran, and you already touched on this, right? There is a parallel here to Trump and the US that we can learn from because Trump, as we know, didn’t come from nowhere. I mean, you have to have a long brewing crisis of legitimacy in the existing system, economy culture to create enough of a desire in people for something as extreme as Trump or bouquet or what have you. And in El Salvador, we can’t pretend that that wasn’t the case. We can’t pretend that working people, poor people were not just devastated for years by drug cartels, by gang violence. This impacted them every single day. And now the functional difference for your average working person in El Salvador, as we’ve heard from them, is I can walk on the streets. My kids can go to school. I don’t feel as afraid anymore. And naive, B, the proto fascist neofascist guy who has accomplished this is the most popular politician in the world right now, but like you said, he’s still serving the needs of capital while addressing some of the needs of the people through draconian measures. And then people, he’s incredibly popular because of that.

What do we do with that? I guess another way of asking that question is what do we do if someone like Trump remains incredibly popular over the next four years? How do we intervene in that? What is the left’s place here?

Francesca Fiorentini:

I mean, I obviously am no expert on El Salvador, but I do just mean to what I hinted at before, there’s only so long you can lock people up and we all know what happens. And it has happened in the United States, that is where gangs are formed. So the odious MS 13 formed, wasn’t it in Los Angeles formed in a prison. So when you lock people up, you are contributing and you treat them like criminals even if they are not criminals to say nothing of how we should be treating criminals. Let’s put that aside. You will create people who are violent, who are gang members who don’t when they come out of prison and you have not helped them reintegrate into society or have offered any kind of job opportunities to say nothing of prohibited them from being employed simply by the fact that they were incarcerated.

What do you think is going to happen? So for me, the bhel model’s really interesting because the US is not El Salvador. Okay? We are not being terrorized by cartels no matter what your Facebook aunt says that is not happening. But what’s interesting about the right in the US is that they’re able to convince us that yes, we are being terrorized by migrants and cartels and it’s happening in Springfield where they’re eating cats and dogs and they’re killing innocent young white victims. And we’re going to pass the Lake and Riley act. And we are convinced that somehow we are El Salvador. And I think any Salvadorian would come here. In fact, they do want to come here precisely because it is safe. So what are you talking about? It is just very funny that the US suffers from this imagined doom and this imagined crime when crime is down.

And so again, back to la, these moments when you’re like, oh, all I got to do is go out, talk to my neighbors, meet people, see the solidarity, see the comradery, and I am suddenly not afraid anymore. I’m not sitting at home just watching local news and getting freaked out. So I think it is our job, while the US is still a relatively safe place because we could get to the levels of El Salvador. That’s what happens when your elites do not invest in their people for decades and decades and decades. But our job is to break through, to humanize specifically, I think the people who’ve been left out of the system, which are unhoused people, the people who are victims of late stage capitalists, greed, and systems not working for them. It’s to hold accountable. Our democratic officials specifically who are still neoliberal actors and who still take corporate donations, it’s to primary them.

It’s to unseat them. It’s to say their way is leading us down the primrose path. Back to fascism. Don’t pull a Biden Newsom, don’t pull a fucking Biden bass. Don’t pull a Biden, don’t deliver us into the hands of Rick Caruso. Don’t deliver us in the hands of a Republican governor so you can seek higher office. So these are all the sites that we need to fight on because it’s not just the global demagoguery. It’s happening in every single place where you have very feckless politicians who might be smart. Newsom’s a smart guy, he knows what he’s talking about, but he also knows that he’s never going to pass Medicare for all for California, that he’s going to skirt environmental regulations so that rich people can rebuild their homes in places they probably shouldn’t build. So we’ve got time on some of these areas.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and the crazy thing that we’ve got here to make your point that yes, the United States is not El Salvador working, people are not being terrorized by drug cartels ravaging the streets. But the thing is working, people are being killed and terrorized by cartels. They’re just the ones in boardrooms. They’re the ones in dc. They’re the ones who are stocking up the Trump administration right now. They’re the people that everyone was righteously pissed off at after the United Healthcare CEO was assassinated, right? I mean, the cartels are here, they’re running the show, and we are all feeling it in one way or another. They are poisoning our water and buying off politicians to do nothing about it. They are corporate capturing the regulatory agencies that are supposed to protect us, which is why we now all have PFAS and other forever chemicals like microplastics all in our bodies, which is, but to your point, at the same time, the right wing fear machine is constantly trying to convince working people that the dangers are here at eye level. The dangers are around the corner. They’re living in your neighborhood, they’re in your children’s schools, they are your fellow workers who are responsible for your misery, not the people. They’re DI.

They’re

Francesca Fiorentini:

DI. Yeah. And I think that is, and that is so, and this is what I, God, if there’s, you know how we each have the one thing we’ve said a million times over, if there’s one thing that I want people to know of, if my political pecking order, the first thing I want to say is that identity politics are radical. They were developed, identity politics was spearheaded by black feminists who wanted intersectionality, who said, we can tackle capitalism, we can tackle racism, and we can tackle sexism. We can do it all together. That’s identity politics. The problem is Democrats have used hollow empty identity politics only in the form of representation as a stand-in for the real radical identity politics of having not just again, the Cornell Westly black faces in high places, but actually passing legislation that positively affects black communities and poor communities and women.

I mean, the one place that we are like El Salvador in the United States in the year 2025, I visited there and I did a whole piece about how they’re locking women up for having miscarriages because abortion is criminalized because the rights of the fetus are enshrined in the constitution, max. I’m telling you, we are headed there in this country. They will enshrine the rights of the fetus, the rights of the unborn into the US Constitution. And guess what? Then all people with uterus become second class citizens, period. And it is fucking terrifying. And we could be sentenced to 30 years to life. I spoke to women who were in prison longer than their rapists who got them pregnant in the first place. That’s what they were accused of is miscarrying slash abortion. But all to say, I forgot where I was saying before that. You know what I mean?

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah. You’re spiting fire. And I kind of wanted to build on the emotion here because I’m feeling what you’re feeling. I know our audience is feeling it, and we’re all feeling a lot of shit right now. And I kind of want to dig into that real quick. And again, I’m looking at questions in live chat and comments. We’re going to be throwing them up. But on that last point, I want to ask if we could maybe just break the fourth wall here. And I have a question for you, Fran, which is right now, what do you think your most unproductive fear is and what your most productive anger or where your most productive anger is coming from? I mean, I guess for us to be a little sort of internally mindful of where our emotions are coming from and where they’re driving us. I am not telling people out there don’t feel anything, but don’t be overwhelmed by those feelings, but also know how you can harness those feelings and when those feelings are harnessing you for other ends. So yeah, I guess just sort of an open question right now, what’s the most immobilizing, unproductive fear that you’re feeling now? And what’s something that’s galvanizing you?

Francesca Fiorentini:

Most unproductive fear is America’s cooked. We need to go by, how do I get out of here? How should I take my child and leave somewhere where the air is cleaner and there aren’t guns in people’s hands? And somewhere that respects her bodily autonomy and her rights. That’s where my maybe unproductive fear is at. And my productive fear is when I squarely plant myself in my place, and I say, you live in a neighborhood, a community, a city. You have an elected official. You can talk to them, you can go, you get involved. There are groups that have been working in the cities that we all live in and the towns we all live in for generations. Plant yourself in this moment in history and get to work.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I think that’s beautifully put. I don’t want to add anything onto that I think was amazing. Well, let’s bring in some comments here from the live chat. A lot of these aren’t even questions, just folks really expressing a lot of things in the live chat that I want to make sure we name here. But we’ve got one comment here from Kevin Tuey. I do know the severity. 8% of Americans, 78% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. Again, if you need a bigger example of why the kind of red state, blue state MAGA Democrat thing is just horse shit, neither of them have a 78% hold on the population that’s working people, blue, red, independent, who are getting screwed over by this economic system. I think that’s very rightly pointed out. And let’s see,

Francesca Fiorentini:

We’ve got, and I think that’s the resurgence in labor organizing too, is like we have enemies. We’ve got a villains list. Your boss is part of it, your landlord is part of it. That is how you’ve got Elon Musk in your life. They are your boss, they are your landlord,

Maximillian Alvarez:

And they run things like bosses. In fact, if you want to learn about and you want a good sense of what we’re in store for in the next four years, and in fact what we’ve been moving towards over the last 40 years, like look at labor struggles, look at how bosses respond to workers when they get uppity and try to exercise their rights. Like they get squashed, they get fired, they have their rights violated, they get intimidated. They’re subjected to unsafe working conditions regularly, yada, yada yada. This is the kind of boss governance that Trump and his cabinet Musk. I mean, that is how they think. They don’t think about us as human beings. We are at best human shaped widgets that can do things for them, but our lives do not matter to them.

Francesca Fiorentini:

No.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And on that, let’s throw a few more comments here. So yeah, I mean I think this is timeless, but well put by Black Rain, you can tell the greatness of a nation by how they treat the less fortunate.

Speaker 4:

And

Maximillian Alvarez:

On that note, it’s important to underline as Fran and Medi and I have been in this live stream, that we need to not just think about the United States as the center of the universe here. And in fact, there’s going to be a real interesting dynamic going on between the NAFTA countries, Canada, the US and Mexico. And right now you’ve got Mexico’s new president, Gloria Scheinbaum saying explicitly on the so Klo in Mexico City that we have to prioritize the poor for the good of all. That’s kind of to the point of the comment that we just read. And Fran, I’m curious how you’re looking at the soul of that statement and also how Mexico and shine bomb’s government are going to be a player in the next four years. I

Francesca Fiorentini:

Mean, again, I wish I could only do Latin American politics. I like it way better than American politics. So I am no expert, but I have been really heartened by shine bounds rise to power her posturing, her being able to sort of stand up to Trump, but also say we’re willing to work with you. And then of course, in the LA fires, most recently sending 75 firefighters and other national forestry and disaster relief workers and officials to Los Angeles and saying, we believe in solidarity. We are a nation of generosity and solidarity. Max Trump, the Mexicans are rapists and criminals is about to assume office on Monday. And the president of Mexico wants to be in solidarity with us. I mean, it is crushingly.

I don’t even know. I don’t have words for that kind of treatment when we have treated them so opposite. And so I think that there’s a model there. I don’t think it’s an accident. She’s a woman. But again, hey, look at me playing the identity politics card. But I think it shows you that her administration and AMLO enjoyed a certain amount of support already from the people what they had done and delivered for the Mexican people clearly bore out. And so that she can get away with saying, when we help the poor, we help everyone imagine if what would happen in this country, all the Jesus lovers would be like, Ew, gross poor. I don’t believe in poverty. No, no, no, no, no. I’m in the prosperity gospel. God delivers to those who are rich more riches. And I think we had the beginnings and the fits and starts of that in Bernie Sanders. But I dunno about you Max, but I’m still in the post-election haze where I haven’t fully decided to support the Democratic party. I’m still like Uhuh. They have to do a lot to earn my vote and trust and we have to do a lot to change them. So if you don’t let us change you and transform you then and get out of the way, then we’re going to have a problem.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah, I mean, I’ll be honest, that’s where I am. I mean you and so many others that we’ve spoken to on this channel. I mean, I think I’m not naive and I grew up a deep red Republican in Southern California in Orange County. I spent the first half of my life a Latino orange county, very outspoken Republican,

Speaker 4:

And

Maximillian Alvarez:

Now I’m a lefty socialist nut job years later. That was a long ideological journey that really began or really turned in the financial crash and great recession in the 2008, 9, 10, 11, that range. Those were the years that really changed my life, changed my family’s life. Those were the years where the system that I thought I could work hard in and be rewarded for showed how nakedly the deck was stacked in favor of the fuckers who got bailed out for causing a crisis that led to millions of families like mine losing everything, including the home that I grew up in.

Speaker 4:

I

Maximillian Alvarez:

Was working in warehouses in factories 12 years ago, not knowing what the hell I was going to be doing with my life. But that period I think was really important in sort of breaking a lot of that ideological crust that I had. Maybe it was the sort of optimism of youth. Maybe it was also still the last drags of the post Cold War era where it felt for many of us, the US was going to have a big enough pie for all of us to get a piece

Francesca Fiorentini:

And make a good life for us. Sure, you just work hard enough you can get that piece. And now, I mean it’s amazing people now I think there isn’t even that if you work hard, I think everyone left right? Doesn’t matter where you stand. You understand that working hard is not going to deliver. Now it’s about how do I get the cheat code for this life so I can at least not even be rich, but just be comfortable. You need a cheat code to even own a house, right? I need a cheat code. And often that cheat code is a shortcut by bashing minorities and immigrants and women and whomever else who I think has a little bit of something that I want. And so just when I really empathize with people who believe in crypto, and again, I’m not here to knock it. I know a lot of people have it, but it’s like I understand the impetus to like, well, look, if I just play this lottery a little bit, maybe I can get out of the dregs of where the majority of people in this country are at. And in that sense, the right wing narrative of you too can be a billionaire tomorrow. I mean, they’re really just pedaling one massive Ponzi scheme, except there are bodies that have to be, that are being claimed in the process

Maximillian Alvarez:

That hit like an ice pick to the chest. And I know we only have a couple more minutes

Here, but I want to circle back to something you said when we were talking about the productive and unproductive fears we’re dealing with now. And I think this also hooks into some of the comments and questions I’m seeing here in the live chat. So I want to put up two here in succession. One, I think a really pointed question from the brindle boxer, it’s beyond depressing. How do we get out of the doom loop considering what we’re facing in four days? And the brindle boxer just want to let you know we are with you. We’re all feeling that. And I want us to end on that question while also kind of highlighting this other comment from Black Reign, again about the need to intervene on the local level and do what we can to hold politicians accountable, not just react to Trump, but all those people throughout the political hierarchy with names and faces and positions and emails and phone numbers. There’s actually a lot that you can do when you see the spread of power instead of just believing that it all resides in one person over here in Washington dc.

Speaker 4:

And

Maximillian Alvarez:

So I kind of wanted to end on that note, Francesca, and give you the final word here. We don’t have to give everyone a playbook of everything they can do. As we say here at The Real News all the time, no one can do everything, but everyone can do something more often than not that something is going to be in your area in the circles, you have influence in your community, in your apartment building, in your workplace, in your district. So I wanted to just ask for your final thoughts on that, Fran. Not just how people can get more involved locally, but what doing something in your real physical world, offline, why that is so crucial to fighting the larger forces that we are going up against right now.

Francesca Fiorentini:

I mean, every time there’s a demonstration, every time there’s a protest, every time you go out and you make your sign and you listen to a speech and your legs are hurting and you can’t hear the speech and whatever, I really feel that every time I do that, every time I’m with community, I feel much better. I feel mentally prepared and physically and mentally not alone. So I do think protest has a place in the world. We know it has power. Concedes nothing without a demand, never has, never will. But it’s also for our own nourishment. I feel nourished when I am in community, whether it’s chanting, whatever, a slogan or a song, but I also feel nourished. I feel like I have a couple moments of maybe happiest moments in Francesca’s last 10 years and some of the other than my child being born, obviously two moments stick out.

One fundraiser for the I Napa 43 disappeared students, teacher students in Mexico who disappeared in 2015, I believe. And I was at a fundraiser back then in San Francisco, and it was obviously, this is a terrible thing that happened. It should be incredibly depressing. But there was the food, the music, the number of people that came out, the activists and organizers and community leaders that hadn’t seen each other in so long. But this awful event brought us together and we were dancing and we were raising money and we were just in it. And it was truly one of the nicest nights I’ve experienced. Another day in this last year comes to mind when a pro-Palestinian market took place, sprung up in la. I don’t know the organizer’s name and I apologize, but there was everyone selling kafis and pins and cute hats to doing henna tattoos to selling their delicious food from all over the world, amazing, affordable plates. And then you had the poetry and the music and you’re just like, this is it. I feel so fucking seen. I feel so fucking support. We’re not here all chanting, Rob, we’re not getting mad. We’re not having a meeting. We’re eating good food. We’re listening to beautiful music. We are making art. And I know this sounds corny, but I’m telling you, it was like it was intergenerational. I brought my daughter like, don’t, don’t. Don’t sleep on building community and having fun. Allow yourself to be joyous even as we resist.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I think it was beautiful, powerful words by the great Francesca Fiorentini. If y’all are watching and you are not subscribed to Francesca’s show the Situation room, you really need to go correct that asap.

Speaker 4:

Francesca,

Maximillian Alvarez:

I cannot thank you enough for the spending this hour and a half with us. I can’t thank the great Hassan enough for joining us for that first hour. Again, if you’re not subscribing to EO and following the great work Me’s doing and all the folks at eo, including now contributors like Francesca herself, who has a great piece out on the LA fires and the people helping in the midst of tragedy, go watch that video, subscribe to eo, follow Francesca Fran, what are you going to be up to? Where can folks find you? Just final plug here before we

Francesca Fiorentini:

Close out. Yeah, yeah. Look, Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays live, 1:00 PM Pacific, 4:00 PM Eastern youtube.com/franny. Theo fran, I fio o. My name is too long to write it all out. And you can listen as a podcast habitation room. We try to have comedians and then activists and experts and thinkers and all that, and we try to be fun and be a little reverent. Go see live comedy guys. I’ll be at the Ice House in Pasadena next Wednesday, 7:30 PM Tickets are still available. It’s going to be a great show. I’m calling it New World Disorder, a Night of political comedy. So come out to that if you’re in the Pasadena or LA area,

Maximillian Alvarez:

Hell yeah. So everyone out back home, go check that out. Follow Francesca’s work. Fran, I can’t wait to have you back on the channel. Sis, really appreciate you taking the time now.

Francesca Fiorentini:

Thank you, max, as always, for the pointed questions and just your passion, we love it. We see it.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Thank you, sis right back at you means the world to me and to all of you watching, I don’t know what’s going to happen next week, next year, or in the next four to eight to 50 years. In fact, none of us do because that story has yet to be written. I want to kind of close on this thought here because we cannot give over the power of writing history before it’s even been written, right? You can’t ask what the next four years will bring with the assumption that we are just going to be waiting and responding to whatever is passed down from on. High. History is always written in that dialectical space between top and bottom, from the grassroots, from the upper echelons, the struggle over power. We are part of that struggle. What happens next depends on what we all do now, how we respond to it, the demands that we put on power, not just the ways that we respond to the whims of power, right?

I mean, so think about that. Think about the power that you have that your community has, the power you can build with your community, with your coworkers in your workplaces and beyond. You are not powerless here. We are not powerless here, but we will be way less powerful if we already concede the point that what happens in the next few years is just out of our hands. It’s not. And that is what we here at The Real News are committed to people, power and people in general. We are about you and your communities. We are about people around this country and around the world. And we believe all human life is sacred and worth fighting for, and that we all deserve a world better than this. And that we are the ones who are going to make that world happen. And we at The Real News are going to be there covering your struggle as you make it happen. We’re going to be there on the ground. We want to talk to you about what you’re going through and how others can help. So please support our work, subscribe to this channel, reach out to us and let us know about your stories so that we can help lift them up and help them reach more people. And above all else, please take care of yourselves and take care of each other, solidarity forever.

In his 2009 paper Worst-Case Scenarios, Harvard professor Cass Sunstein coined the term the “Goldstein Effect” to describe a government’s “ability to intensify public concern, by giving a definite face to the adversary, specifying a human source of the underlying threat.” His basic argument was that in the instance of the “War on Terror,” the US government had Osama Bin Laden and his steady stream video messages. Selling the Iraq War, the Bush administration, obviously, had Saddam Hussein. The term came from Emmanuel Goldstein, the mysterious Party villain and counter-revolutionary in Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell. Bad Guys, in other words, need a human face for the public to care about a threat. And climate change, unlike the war on terror or other real wars, by its very nature, has no singular villain, nothing the public can put a literal face to. And this, Sunstein argued, is one of the primary barriers to get the public to truly care, on a visceral and real level, about pending climate chaos. 

The reality, of course, is climate change does have villains, with an “s.” The line of demarcation isn’t neat and clean, but, broadly speaking, it’s fossil fuel executives, their bought-and-paid-for politicians and media propagandists, and the private equity and hedge funds that fund them. And there are faces of the victims as well: the climate refugees in the Global South who are already suffering mass displacement whose numbers are expected to reach as high as 1.2 billion by 2050, those subject to increasing flash floods, fires, hurricanes, and tsunamis. A demographic that––despite what Serious Centrist Pundits Insist––increasingly includes Americans.

That climate change directly causes more frequent and more severe wildfires is no longer in dispute. A 2022 United Nations report concluded that the risk of wildfires around the world will surge as climate change intensifies. “The heating of the planet is turning landscapes into tinderboxes, while more extreme weather means stronger, hotter, drier winds to fan the flames,” states the report, produced by 50 researchers from six continents.

Media coverage of these sensationalist events almost never connects the dots. A survey of Nightly News coverage from the first full day of the LA fires showed that, in 16 minutes of coverage ABC, NBC, and CBS nightly news broadcasts did not mention climate change once. In their Wednesday morning coverage of the LA fires, neither the New York Times Daily podcast nor the New York Times Morning Newsletter addressed climate change at all. The Daily had a single throwaway mention but didn’t actually talk about it, and the newsletter just ignored it. One can see dozens and dozens of examples of lurid coverage of the LA Wildfires—and other extreme weather events—in US media that doesn’t mention climate change at all or relegates it to a throwaway line. 

Climate change-fueled extreme weather disasters overseas are typically ignored or downplayed altogether. A survey of two weeks of coverage from April 15 to 29—when the 2022 heat wave in India and Pakistan was at its most acute and newsworthy,ultimately killing almost 100—showed that it was ignored entirely by CNN’s primetime news programs: The Lead with Jake Tapper, The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer, and Anderson Cooper 360°. The heat wave was also entirely ignored by NBC News (Today, Nightly News with Lester Holt, and Meet the Press), CBS News (Evening News, Sunday Morning News, and CBS Mornings), and ABC News (Good Morning America, World News Tonight, and This Week With George Stephanopoulos). By way of comparison, a survey of the same news programs from the week of May 30 to June 6 showed almost 2.5 hours of coverage of Queen Elizabeth II’s Jubilee, a holiday in the United Kingdom celebrating the 70th anniversary of her coronation.

To be clear, many of these outlets do sometimes have separate articles about the connection between climate change and extreme weather events. But they’re typically relegated to “science” stories isolated from the original, far more impactful reporting of the human tragedy unfolding before our eyes. They read more like liberal box-checking than a fundamental feature of how these stories are covered. Severe weather events, when they’re reported on at all (typically because they’re within the US) are indexed in the “Oh, Dearism” genre of reporting, where politics and human decision making are stripped away entirely, and all one can do is look on helplessly and say “Oh, Dear.” There’s no villain, victims but no victimizer, no political actors or politics at all, and—above all—no explicit or implicit call to action. Just agency-free human suffering that may sorta kinda be linked to erratic weather patterns, with no sense there’s anything the viewer or reader can actually do about it. It’s just vaguely sad and everyone is expected to chip in a few dollars to GoFundMe, gawk at the suffering, and move on to the next extreme weather event right around the corner in a matter of weeks. Nothing is ever part of a pattern, a broader human-driven context. The headlines should, at least occasionally, read “Human-Caused Climate Change Fuels Another Disaster With LA Fires, not just a stream of “LA Fires Grip Nation.” 

If one accepts the basic tenets of the scientific consensus around climate change, that we more or less have a decade to radically alter course, then why wouldn’t our media outlets be more clear about the causes of the suffering, and what forces would have to be curtailed to practically do so? In March 2023 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released another damning report, authored by 93 experts, which found that the Earth’s average temperatures are likely on pace to rise by 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) over pre-industrial levels by the first half of the 2030s. This shift would surpass a climate threshold, they argue, which will unleash unprecedented flooding, heat waves, megastorms, and famines that could very well threaten all of human civilization. The only chance we have to avoid this extremely plausible scenario is for rich nations to immediately slash their greenhouse emissions and do so right away. 

Newsrooms are still neatly delineating the human story and the “science” story, when these are one and the same. Without centering the scientific explanation of the why—which is to say, the cause of the human suffering on display—journalism is just emotional pornography. We can’t cover school shootings without centering lawmakers who defend and take large sums of cash from gunmakers. We can’t cover mass death in Gaza without centering Israel and the White House’s central role in causing it. And we can’t cover extreme weather events without centering climate change, and the fossil execs and their media and political organs that fuel it. To do so is to take politics out of what is inherently political, to only show a small slice of a much larger and richer story. If US media won’t permit its viewers to put a face to the villain of extreme weather––and in the wake of media anger over Luigi Magione’s online popularity, this will almost certainly never happen––they can at least permit its viewers to put a face to its victims. On a negligent, massive scale, they are still failing to do so.

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.

Fish and wildfires don’t tend to go together. But as a series of blazes driven by 100-mile-per-hour winds burned throughout Los Angeles, the country’s incoming president centered blame on a three-inch fish found in a completely different part of the state.

In a post on incoming President Donald Trump’s Truth Social, he blamed California Gov. Gavin Newsom for not signing an agreement “that would have allowed millions of gallons of water, from excess rain and snow melt from the North, to flow daily into many parts of California, including the areas that are currently burning in a virtually apocalyptic way” all to “protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt.” 

The post was just one of many flooding social media with misinformation and falsehoods assigning blame for the unprecedented fires that have destroyed thousands of homes, forced over 130,000 people to evacuate and killed at least five people. The Palisades, Eaton and Hurst fires are already the most destructive in the history of the nation’s second-largest city, with all three continuing to burn with little if any containment so far and another fire breaking out in the city Thursday evening. Nowhere to be found in Trump’s message was the impact of climate change or how communities have been built in areas prone to fire. Just false mentions of the little-known endangered fish causing fire hydrants to run dry. 

The finger-pointing surrounding the LA fires offer a glimpse of the way political polarization and propaganda can increase the confusion that engulfs natural disasters. And the information ecosystem is expected to be further tested during climate-fueled disasters as social media platforms like Facebook roll back fact-checking programs.

“Several of the statements made by incoming president-elect Trump, as well as Elon Musk, were riddled with both misinformation about our water management system as well as about the fires,” said Ashley Overhouse, a water policy advisor for Defenders of Wildlife whose work has focused on protecting the Delta smelt. “That kind of misinformation is not only incredibly inappropriate here, it’s also dangerous.” 

The real reasons places like California are seeing more natural disasters, from wildfires to droughts to floods, are often swamped in the sea of misinformation. 

How Climate Change Fuels Bigger and Hotter Wildfires

Climate change has driven “weather whiplash” throughout California in recent years, with dramatic shifts in the state’s precipitation, temperature and wind patterns.

A severe drought gripped the region from 2020 to 2022. The next two years returned to the norm, with 2023 seeing 10 inches more rain than the average year. But recent months have brought back record-dry conditions for much of Southern California, drying out the vegetation that boomed during the moist years and leaving the landscape primed to burn.

Then the region’s Santa Ana winds, driven by extreme differences between high pressure in the Great Basin, to the east, and low pressure off the California coast, blasted at over 100 miles per hour. Santa Ana winds have been increasingly blowing in December and January, rather than the fall.

Such conditions have helped to extend California’s fire season year round, making major wildfires possible even in January.

“It’s not so much a problem that a fire happens, which is a very common occurrence in our ecosystems, but it might spread and ignite and grow much more quickly due to climate change,” said Sara McTarnaghan, a principal research associate at the Urban Institute who studies climate resilience and how communities are impacted by natural disasters. “So for many issues we have this environmental national phenomenon that exists, but it’s made more severe in some way.”

And those natural occurrences become disasters when cities and communities have been built in areas prone for them, she said.

“In a lot of places across the country, we have up until now taken insufficient action to adapt to climate change,” McTarnaghan said.

Mayor Karen Bass warned that Los Angeles could face more of these natural disasters. “Due to climate change, we are going to continue to see very unusual weather events,” she said during a Wednesday press conference in response to the fires. 

Misinformation and disinformation can add even more volatility to climate-driven disasters.

Tim Casperson, the host of the Hotshot Wake Up Podcast, which covers wildfire policy and response, dedicated a large section of his show on Thursday to debunking false claims about the LA fires. Casperson, who worked as a wildland firefighter, referenced people “making quite ridiculous claims about what’s happening out there.”

“There is a low bar when it comes to folks understanding wildfire,” he lamented.

Competing Claims About Fire Department Budget

Bass has been criticized for traveling to Ghana as the high winds mounted. She returned to Los Angeles on Wednesday to growing outrage over her handling of the fires. But some of the criticisms lodged against the mayor on social media were dubious if not outright false. 

Social media lit up with posts accusing Bass of cutting the budget for the Los Angeles Fire Department in favor of the Police Department. Los Angeles Times owner Pat Soon-Shiong posted on X that the mayor cut the department’s budget by $23 million. News reports referencing budget documents pointed out that Bass had cut the budget by $17.6 million from the previous year. 

But the real story is more complicated. The Los Angeles City Council adopted the budget in May, after intense pressure to make cuts. Months later, in November, the city approved a new contract with the union representing firefighters. The new contract included an annual 3 percent increase to their base wages. The city had set aside funding during the budget process in anticipation of the new contract, according to news reports at the time.

While the original allocation for LAFD had decreased $17.6 million—only 2 percent of the department’s budget—the funds dedicated to the new contract offset that amount. City documents show that the budget for operational supplies increased in 2023-2024 and then went back down in 2024-2025 after specific purchases were completed. In a Politico story, Los Angeles Councilmember Bob Blumenfield said that the city’s fire budget actually increased more than $50 million compared to the previous budget cycle. Inside Climate News reached out to Blumenfield’s office and the firefighters’ union, neither of which responded to emailed questions.

In the press conference Wednesday, Bass briefly addressed the uproar over the budget. “Within this fiscal year, LAFD would actually go above what it was allocated on July 1,” she said.

When reporters in attendance brought up a December request from the fire department for more funding, department spokesperson Jacob Raabe responded.

“Of course we can always use more resources, which is why we ask for more resources,” Raabe said. But he highlighted the challenge presented by the unprecedented nature of the fires, not the department’s budget. Officials noted that other fire departments have come to help Los Angeles because of the massive scale of the disaster.

“I’ve never seen winds that made it to the Pacific Ocean, turned around, and went back up the canyon,” the LAFD spokesperson said.

“When you have events like this where emotions are high … it’s easy to get caught up in information that’s not accurate,” Bass said Wednesday.

Tiny Endangered Fish Often Attacked by Trump

As firefighters battled the fire burning in the Pacific Palisades Wednesday morning, some 200 fire hydrants went dry, and rumors spread on social media that California’s lack of action to store more water during the recent wet winters was to blame.

Officials were forced to explain why the fire hydrants went dry and correct other falsehoods during press conferences that would normally be dedicated to providing real-time information on the progress of the fire, the firefighters and evacuations.

Janisse Quiñones, chief executive officer and chief engineer of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, explained during the press conference that the water distribution system saw four times the demand than it ever had before. 

“Fire hydrants are not made to fight multiple houses, hundreds of houses at a time,” she said. “They’re made to fight one or two houses.”

The system relies on three nearby water tanks located downhill from the site, which each holds 1 million gallons. With all the pumping to stop the fires, the tanks needed time to be refilled to restore pressure so the water could continue flowing uphill. High winds prevented helicopters from dropping water from the air, which only increased the pressure on the water tanks in the Palisades area.

But that context didn’t stop Trump from continuing his attack on the Delta smelt, the tiny endangered fish native to the San Francisco Estuary, though a truly wild one hasn’t been counted in years.

Listed under both federal and California endangered species acts since 1993, the fish has been a frequent target of Trump since 2016. While courting the votes of farmers facing water shortages at the time, he told a crowd in Fresno, California, that “there is no drought” in California and that the aridity was due to water being sent out to the ocean to help the smelt. 

The reality, of course, is much more complicated. The Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta is vital to the state’s water supply, providing water to 30 million people and 6 million acres of farmland across the state. Water is sent around the state via two systems with a giant network of reservoirs, pumps and canals that are operated by both the state and the federal government to supply California’s major cities and vital agricultural operations.

A small portion of the water goes to support wildlife, such as ensuring the San Francisco Estuary, where freshwater meets the sea, isn’t too salty, which helps not only the endangered Delta smelt, but the entire ecosystem, including other fish and even humans, said Defenders of Wildlife’s Overhouse. The freshwater sent to the estuary protects the region’s water quality and helps ensure the water that farmers use isn’t too saline for farming, she said.

“Delta smelt are the canary in the coal mine for ecosystem collapse and unfortunately, in this case, they are the red herring then as well, for decision-makers who do not understand the complexity of our water system and blame one species for a lack of flow that’s being pumped artificially down to Southern California,” Overhouse said. “That’s just really not the case.”

If that water wasn’t used for the Delta smelt, California water law would send it to farmers in the Central Valley who have priority water rights, not to fight fires in Los Angeles.

On Dec. 7, working-class residents of Curtis Bay and other South Baltimore neighborhoods marched through the streets of Annapolis and delivered a giant stocking full of coal to the Governor’s mansion. They are demanding Gov. Wes Moore intervene in a generations-long struggle to stop rail giant CSX transportation from polluting their bodies, homes, and communities with toxic coal dust.

CSX is not the only polluter in South Baltimore: industrial areas near Curtis Bay house oil tanks, a wastewater treatment plant, chemical plants, landfills, the country’s largest medical waste incinerator, and more. But a recent air quality study confirmed what residents have been complaining about for generations: Coal dust from the CSX Transportation coal export terminal is present all over Curtis Bay. CSX has denied culpability and called the study “materially flawed.” Residents say they’re fed up with the company refusing to take responsibility for the coal dust, and with the city government for ignoring their cries for help for years. So they are demanding that Gov. Moore and the Maryland Department of the Environment deny CSX’s operational permit for the coal terminal, a permit that the MDE has been reviewing for renewal.

Studio Production: Maximillian Alvarez, Norma Martinez
Post-Production: Kate Lindsay, David Hebden

Transcript

Annapolis March: “What do we want? Deny the permit!  When do we want it? Now! And if we don’t get it? Shut it down! If we don’t get it?  Shut it down! If we don’t get it… Shut it down…”

Maximillian Alvarez: Working-class residents of Curtis Bay and other South Baltimore neighborhoods marched through the streets of Annapolis in early December, and delivered a giant stocking full of coal to the Governor’s mansion. They are demanding Governor Wes Moore intervene in a generations-long struggle to stop rail giant CSX transportation from polluting their bodies, homes, and communities with toxic coal dust.

Nicole Fabricant: Governor Moore will not come to see the tragedy of Curtis Bay, so we have brought the community to Governor Moore.

David Jones: It’s a little different here in Annapolis. I can actually take a deep breath and don’t feel like I’m gonna throw up or choke. So that’s a good thing. So if you could please make the air like it is here in Annapolis in my community, or even a little bit better, I think myself and others would really appreciate that.

Phil Ateto: Governor Moore is treating Curtis Bay like a sacrifice zone, which is the opposite of his campaign slogan and pledge to ‘leave no one behind.’ Governor Moore, you are leaving Curtis Bay behind… Governor Moore, meet with the Curtis Bay community, reject the coal pier permit, and keep your commitment to communities across Maryland. 

Maximillian Alvarez: CSX is not the only polluter in South Baltimore, but it runs uncovered coal trains through the same places people live in, and it operates a massive coal terminal in their backyard. Between the Curtis Bay Coal Pier and the CONSOL Energy Baltimore Marine terminal, served by both CSX and Norfolk Southern railroad, the Port of Baltimore is the second largest coal export port in the United States. Dozens of South Baltimore residents, community association members, and allies from climate justice movements across Maryland brought a message to Governor Moore from their communities: deny CSX’s operational permit for the coal terminal, a permit that the Maryland Department of the Environment has been reviewing for renewal.

Shashawnda Campbell: You wouldn’t dream that you’d have to come somewhere to say, ‘Please stop poisoning me,’ right?… And it’s even worse that the community that’s been dealing with this burden for decades, decades upon decades—spills, leaks, explosions—time after time after time have to also be the ones to come here to say, ‘We need help.’

Dave Jones: So this will never come out of my lungs, ever. This is probably what’s gonna cause my death. I’ve never been in a coal mine in my life, and I guarantee you when they cut me open, I’ll look like the coal miner that’s been there his whole life.

Shashawnda Campbell: When we think about when somebody [is] doing something violent—we see it and we’re like, ‘We gotta stop that!.’ This IS violence. This is violence against our community.

Dave Jones: This is murder. This is murder on a grand scale. The amount of cancer rates in my community are disgusting! And I, for one, am done. So I am pleading to our governor to please do something about this, sir. Please do your job!

Maximillian Alvarez: A recent air quality study confirmed what residents have been complaining about for generations: coal dust from the CSX transportation coal export terminal is present all over Curtis Bay. Coal dust contains heavy metals that can be lethal, including selenium, chromium, arsenic, mercury, and lead. 

Matthew Aubourg: We’re finding science that is supporting what community and what residents have been saying for decades… We shouldn’t need to be bringing this evidence to the table in the first place. What residents are experiencing, what people are seeing every day—that should be enough to make the change that’s needed in the community.

Maximillian Alvarez: The year-long study was released by the Community of Curtis Bay Association, South Baltimore Community Land Trust, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Maryland and the Maryland Department of the Environment. Yet CSX still claims the study was flawed and denies the results, and CSX also says it is abiding by existing regulations and meeting the Environmental Protection Agency’s National Ambient Air Quality Standards. Residents say CSX is full of it, that the study is not flawed, and that their bodies bear the proof of the deadly pollution the company denies. 

Shashawnda Campbell: We are here fighting for the community, to say, ‘It’s not OK to have this coal terminal right next to communities and not doing anything to stop it.’ And so we need Governor Moore to come out and actually stand with the people and hold this facility accountable for the harms that it has caused.

Maximillian Alvarez: CSX reported over $14 billion in total revenue last year, and a net profit of ​​$3.72 billion.

Dave Jones: I don’t understand how you can justify profits over someone dying 20 years earlier than they’re expected to be, or getting cancer and having a horrible rest of their existence for the time they have left…

The first thing you can do is declare a state of emergency for environmental injustice, and then we can go from there. What that looks like down the road, I don’t know. But I know the only way that we’re really gonna change this is if … we don’t get rid of these industries, is to change the status quo of what they get fined for being bad actors.

Shashawnda Campbell: So we are calling for our governor—our governor [who] says so much about reducing greenhouse gasses and this and that—to actually stand on your words and do it. And you can do it single handedly by holding this coal terminal accountable by denying their permit so that coal terminal is not functional.

Maximillian Alvarez: At a community meeting in November, in which Maryland Department of the Environment officials and a CSX representative were present, residents of Curtis Bay and other South Baltimore neighborhoods like Cherry Hill, Westport, Mt. Winans, Lakeland, and Brooklyn, shared fiery testimonies. They unanimously expressed anger and frustration towards CSX, and many urged the MDE to reject the operating permit for the CSX Transportation Coal Export Terminal. The agency says it’s amending the existing permit to impose stricter requirements on the railroad giant’s operations, and that it can enforce these restrictions with fines and even litigation, but does not have the authority to shut down CSX’s operations.

Halyna Mudryj: I invite the people who work for CSX, those in charge: Please, come and live in our community.

Jeffrey Barnes: MDE is ignoring us, and you, for years. There’s no question that the coal dust is poisoning our communities, causing cancers. That’s not a question. And yet we come here every year, and what do we say? ‘Please, you’ve got to stop this poisoning of our community.’ This is something that the state should do.

Melanie Thomas: This is not just a Curtis Bay issue. Every community where that coal train passes through, you are being impacted too. Do y’all hear me? Every community that a train passes through carrying coal, you are being impacted too. Because it’s not just an isolated incident or an isolated area that we are talking about. We are talking about lives, we are talking about communities, miles and miles of people—people living and breathing like you and I—that are being affected each and every day by these fine particulate matters, these particles that we are breathing in day after day.

Maximillian Alvarez: Standing here in Curtis Bay, South Baltimore, where a seemingly endless CSX locomotive is slowly pulling car after car after car of uncovered coal containers.

Angie Shaneyfelt: So that’s the coal pile that we’ve been fighting for years and years and years. And literally right here, this white siding, is my house—about a football field, football field and a half, away from my house.

Maximillian Alvarez: Angie Shaneyfelt lives just up the street from the CSX coal terminal. She and her family have been dealing with the realities of living in a “sacrifice zone” for years, like not opening their windows for the past 16 years, but it was after an explosion at the coal pier in December of 2021 that she got actively involved in the fight to hold CSX accountable for its toxic pollution. Again, CSX is not the only polluter in South Baltimore: Industrial areas near Curtis Bay house oil tanks, a wastewater treatment plant, chemical plants, landfills, the country’s largest medical waste incinerator, and more. But Angie says that everyone knows what the constant black dust in the community is, the harms it causes, and where it’s coming from. 

Angie Shaneyfelt: So this is my windowsill, covered porch, totally black fingers now. Undisturbed. And it’s even up, it’s all the way up in here.” [shows finger and looks at the camera] … And this is 16 years now, since 2009, that we have not opened our windows fully to breathe fresh air, because the fresh air is not fresh. It’s coal dust, dirty.

We are here in Curtis Bay community—a community of people, different kinds of people, all different walks of life. Most of the people around are renters. And we’re not that far away from the coal pile right there. I’ve lived here 16 years. And we don’t… everybody’s in, inside. Even on a nice day—inside. Because we don’t like this dust and breathing it in. Nobody should be breathing in this dust.

Right here, right next to the coal, like less than 1,000 feet away is where the community starts. When we had the explosion, people’s windows were shattered out of their house, out of the frames. So crazy. And [we’ve] not gotten anything, really, since then. The only thing we get is doubt: ‘No, it’s not dust, it’s not coal dust, it’s something else.’ But we know what it is. Generations have fought this, and we’re gonna keep fighting it.

Maximillian Alvarez: For The Real News Network, this is Maximillian Alvarez reporting from South Baltimore.

On October 29, the Spanish town of Paiporta, Valencia, was swept by more rain in four hours than it had received in the past three years. The resulting torrent gutted the entire community, killing over 200 residents. While Valencians have banded together to survive and rebuild, their solidarity of necessity is accompanied by a simmering fury at the government’s failures. The Real News reports from Valencia, Spain.

Producers: Belal Awad, Leo Erhardt
Videography: Mario Capetillo Torres
Video Editor: Leo Erhardt

Transcript

David – Paiporta resident: 

When the water rose all the way up there, that’s when the cell phone warnings came through. By then, my dog had already drowned here on the ground floor, that’s when the alarms went off, the warnings started coming in: “Peep peep! Watch out, the ravines are overflowing.” What happened here is unacceptable. It’s unacceptable. 

Narrator: 

On October 29th, 2024, the small Spanish town of Paiporta became a flashpoint in an unprecedented natural disaster. A rare weather event caused by the meeting of warm and cold fronts unleashed huge amounts of rainfall on the Spanish region of Valencia. More rain in 4 hours than the previous 3 years combined. The storm – referred to by the abbreviation DANA – claimed the lives of 220 people, with tens of people still missing. Today, the town’s residents are angry, they accuse the regional and central government of a slow and negligent response. But where the authorities have failed, volunteers have stepped in. 

Goyo – Volunteer: 

Well, it looks like some heads might roll. Watching the news, you get the impression they didn’t issue a very effective warning for people to take the necessary precautions, knowing that such a massive flood was on its way. 

But groups like ours are really essential because, right now, we don’t see any military presence distributing food. It’s only the volunteer organizations and NGOs providing support to those in need. 

Volunteer: 

– Would you like some slices of melon? 

– Yeah, we’ve got a Tupperware. 

– Of course. 

David – Paiporta resident: 

They left us abandoned for the first 24 hours. We were alone for the first 48 hours. We were entering supermarkets, grabbing food trying to survive as if there were no government. It wasn’t until the third or fourth day that we finally started seeing some presence from the army and others. We felt completely alone and forsaken. In a country where we pay taxes, this should not be happening. And then, just last night, they pulled six more bodies out from under the mud along the tracks. Does it make sense that after ten days, they still haven’t sent enough personnel to find all the missing, or at least most of them? It’s unacceptable, completely unacceptable.

Paiporta resident: 

But as I’m saying, this could happen to any Spaniard. The flood has impacted Valencia. But all of Spain, our leaders have abandoned us. Tomorrow, this could happen somewhere else in Spain. We’ll help, but bear in mind, our leaders won’t. What do we even need those leaders for? I don’t want them; I’ll govern myself, damn it. 

Narrator: 

It was here in Paiporta, that the King and Queen of Spain, the Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez and the regional leader of Valencia, Carlos Mazon came to visit after DANA. And it was here where they were all greeted with mud and dirt thrown at them by angry locals. Whilst the King and Queen stayed to talk to locals, Prime Minister Sanchez and regional head Mazon, both made a hasty retreat. 

David – Paiporta resident: 

It’s a huge outrage, and the anger running through the town is impressive. There are a lot of inconsistencies; the numbers they’re giving about the missing don’t add up. They’re still finding people. There are garages they haven’t even been able to check because the walls have collapsed. So they can’t tell the truth. Three homeless people who lived there are nowhere to be found. They’re not listed as missing. In Picaña, there were three or four homeless people in a park who are also unaccounted for. They could write this off as other causes of death. We’re furious, indignant, and feeling a deep-seated rage that’s indescribable. 

Chantings: 

Where’s your mud? Where’s your mud? 

Murderers! Murderers! Murderers! 

You’re defending a murderer! 

Narrator: 

Over 130,000 protesters took to the streets to not only demand the resignation of regional leader Carlos Mazón, but to demand answers. Answers to questions like, why did Valencian residents only receive warning text messages 14 hours after the regional government had received a series of red weather alerts? For many the text messages came all too late. 

Chantings: 

Resign! Resign! 

Where were you when you were needed? Where? You’re all dogs! You, you, and you are worthless! 

Protester:

Mazón was completely absent. Here, the people are saving the people. That’s what’s happening here today in the Town Hall square, in this November 9 protest, demanding Mazón’s resignation. 

Protester: 

We’ve had to coordinate ourselves. We’re doing everything by ourselves. And now they try to paint us as heroes, we don’t have to take care of this, they have to take care of everything. And next week, now that the people are more or less safe, what has to happen is that instead of asking for forgiveness, they resign! Out of pure shame of what they’ve done. 

Paul – Valencia resident: 

My view is that the management by the Valencian government bordered on criminal negligence, by not warning people, downplaying the tragedy beforehand, and trying to hide their incompetence. The Spanish central government, too, treats us like a colony, more worried about getting the AVE train to Valencia and making sure tourists can still come to the beach. And companies prioritize their interests over the safety of their workers, both on the day of the disaster and in the days afterward. 

Lucia – Valencia resident: 

I believe it’s our duty as citizens to present our complaints against the entire political mismanagement of this DANA, which led to the loss of countless lives that could have been saved. And the chaos that followed the DANA has been even worse than the DANA itself. 

Chantings: 

Long live Valencia! 

Volunteer: 

Sandwiches! Go forward if you want one. 

I’m making it with whatever little we have so they can enjoy a little taste of home. We need all of this to go into storage. 

Carlota – Volunteer: 

We’re all in this together. Nobody is anyone’s enemy. It would be easy for us to have a little disagreement and say you’re on one side, and I’m on the other. But right now, we all need to be together and find a solution. I have my opinions, but I’ll keep them to myself because, right now, the priority is for us all to be here, helping however we can with the resources we have. 

Maria del Pilar – Volunteer & victim: 

I’m personally very grateful to the youth, to the people of Valencia who came to the towns to help us, to help us clear everything out and clean our homes. I’m so grateful that, if I could, I’d thank every one of these people personally.

Jesus – Paiporta resident: 

So many different people have come here — people from all over, from outside, from Valencia. Even people from abroad. It’s been remarkable. We can be proud of everyone who’s come to lend a hand. The people will save the people.

Sacrifice zones are areas where people have been left to live in conditions that threaten life itself, from toxic industrial pollution to the deadly, intensifying effects of man-made climate change. In a more just and less cruel society, the very concept of a “sacrifice zone” wouldn’t exist. And yet, in America, after decades of deregulation and public disinvestment, more working-class communities are becoming sacrifice zones, and more of us are being set up for sacrifice at the altars of corporate greed and government abandonment.

America’s sacrifice zones are no longer extreme outliers; they are, in fact, a harrowing model of the future that lies in store for most of us if the corporate monsters, corporate politicians, and Wall Street vampires destroying our communities aren’t stopped. And residents of different sacrifice zones across the country, fellow workers on the frontlines of all this reckless and preventable destruction, are connecting with each other, learning from one another, and working together to fight back. In this Working People liveshow, recorded on Oct. 19 at Red Emma’s worker cooperative bookstore, cafe, and community events space in Baltimore, we speak with a special panel of residents from four different sacrifice zones in the US about how the situations they’re facing in their own communities and their struggles for justice and accountability are connected.

Panelists include: Hilary Flint, communications director of Beaver County Marcellus Awareness Community and a former resident of Beaver County, Pennsylvania, a few miles from the site of the Feb 2023 Norfolk Southern train derailment and chemical disaster in East Palestine, Ohio; Melanie Meade, a community organizer, educator, and life-long resident of Clairton, Pennsylvania, the site of US Steel’s Clairton Coke Works, which was named the most toxic air polluter in Allegheny County in a 2021 report by PennEnvironment; Elise Keaton Wade, a real estate attorney by trade, longtime environmental justice activist, and a native of Southern West Virginia; Angela “Angie” Shaneyfelt, a resident of Curtis Bay in South Baltimore, who lives just blocks away from an open air coal terminal owned and operated by rail giant CSX Transportation, which has been polluting her community for generations.

Special thanks to Dr. Nicole Fabricant and the South Baltimore Community Land Trust for organizing this live show.

Additional links/info below…

• Coal-Free Curtis Bay Facebook page and Instagram
• South Baltimore Community Land Trust website, Twitter/X page, Facebook page, and Instagram
• Beaver County Marcellus Awareness Community website, Facebook page, Instagram, and Twitter/X page
• Hilary’s Instagram
• Nicole Fabricant’s Instagram
• Melanie’s Facebook page
• Angela’s Facebook page
• Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network, “South Baltimore residents on the toxic reality of living in a ‘sacrifice zone’“
• Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network, “East Palestine residents demand fully-funded healthcare“
• Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network, “One year later, East Palestine residents want Norfolk-Southern held accountable”
• Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network, “‘Towns are gone’: In Helene-devastated Asheville, NC, volunteers battle misinformation and ‘apocalyptic’ wreckage”
• Maximillian Alvarez, In These Times / The Real News Network, “Scenes from a sacrifice zone: South Baltimore residents fight back against industrial pollution“
• Maximillian Alvarez & Molly Crabapple, In These Times, “Wasteland warriors”
• Laura Gottesdiener, The Nation, “You can wipe out coal, but you can’t bring the mountains back”
• Nicole Fabricant, University of California Press, Fighting to Breathe: Race, Toxicity, and the Rise of Youth Activism in Baltimore
• Nicole Fabricant, The Real News Network, “Opinion | CSX explosion in Curtis Bay should alarm Baltimore City and accelerate real change”
• Adam Willis, The Baltimore Banner, “A state-backed report found coal dust across Curtis Bay. CSX isn’t convinced“
• Melanie Meade, PublicSource, “Family history, loss and hopes for a bright future fuel my fight for clean air in Clairton”
• Daniel Shailer, PublicSource, “The Mon Valley holds its breath as the latest U.S. Steel settlement promises a fresh approach”

Permanent links below…

• Leave us a voicemail and we might play it on the show!
• Labor Radio / Podcast Network website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• In These Times website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• The Real News Network website, YouTube channel, podcast feeds, Facebook page, and Twitter page

Featured Music…
Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

Studio Production: Max Alvarez
Post-Production: Jules Taylor

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Hilary Flint:

Hi everyone. My name is Hilary Flint. My pronouns are she her. I am from Enon Valley, Pennsylvania that is a town of less than 300 people that borders East Palestinian, Ohio. I have a background of chronic health issues and I’m a young adult cancer survivor, and I’d always been very conscious of the environment and very conscious of health issues, but it wasn’t until the East Palestine trained derailment and chemical disaster did I start organizing full-time in this work. So I’m director of Communications and community Engagement at Beaver County Marcellus Awareness Community. And we really work around fracking and the Shell Plastics plant in Beaver County and also around the East Palestine trained real as well. And then I also work with Clean Air Action Fund. It’s a C four. And the reason I do that is so I can put on a different hat and do things like lobby and help write bills that would prevent these types of things from happening.

And then I also just started working for Center for Oil and Gas organizing around the issue of LNG, which is kind of the next big thing that we need to be working on. But a lot of the work I do is through a lens of disability justice, solidarity building and trying to change the way nonprofits work. So getting more mutual aid, getting money directly to grassroots instead of big green except food and water watch, they can have all the money. So yeah, just figuring out a different way to do the work because I’ve seen that the system currently just does not work.

Melanie Meade:

Hi everyone. My name is Melanie Meade. I’m from Clairton, PA, and I came into this work in 2013 when I was burying my father, when six months later I buried my mother. And from the span of 2011 to 2020, I buried all of my immediate family. I live next to one of the largest plants, USX coing plants in Clairton pa, and I’m so thankful to have sisters like Hilary and everyone on the panel to stand in solidarity with.

Elise Keaton Wade:

Hello, my name is Elise Keaton Wade. I am from Southern West Virginia. I am a real estate attorney by trade, but I got started in my activism 25 years ago on Payford Mountain with Larry Gibson, looking at mountains being blown up for tiny seams of coal through the process of mountaintop removal, strip mining. And that is how I came to my environmentalism. It’s how I became a lawyer trying to find out why it was legal to blow the tops off mountains to get coal. Turns out it’s legal because we made a law allowing it. So it’s a policy issue, right? So I lived in Colorado for a little while. I was licensed to practice out there, and I came back to West Virginia in 2011, reconnected with Larry Gibson in 2012. He passed away shortly thereafter, but I was involved with the organization where I met Dr. Fabricant. And so she and I, 13 years ago sat on Payford Mountain and dreamed of a regional coordination of efforts. And here we are today with multiple states in this room, and we’ve spent two days together talking about how we’re all interconnected. So I’m honored and pleased, and I’m so grateful for each of you being here.

Angela Shaneyfelt:

And I’m Angela Shaneyfelt and I am a community member of Curtis Bay here in Baltimore. And I got started in this in December 30th, 2021 when the CSX Coal terminal had their explosion. And the reason why I am here is just when you look into your child’s eyes and they’re mentally checked out and you don’t know why. So that’s why I am here.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right, welcome everyone to this special live show of working people, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today, brought to you in partnership within in these Times Magazine and the Real News Network produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximillian Alvarez, and I cannot overstate how much of an honor it is to be sitting here with all of you here in this room here at this table. As those of you listening just heard, we have a really special installment of our ongoing series sacrificed where we have been talking with working class folks, living, working and fighting for justice in different, so-called Sacrifice Zones around the US and even beyond. And we are sitting here in the great red Emma’s cooperative bookstore and cafe and organizing space here in Baltimore. Shout out to Red Emmas, thank you for hosting us.

And I also wanted to shout out and thank the great Dr. Nicole Fabrican for bringing us altogether, everyone at the South Baltimore Community Land Trust for bringing us together. And thank you for all the incredible work that y’all do, and thank you all for being here. And yeah, as listeners of this show, no, I didn’t expect to be doing this kind of work. I’ve been doing this show for years, mainly talking to working people about their lives, jobs, dreams and struggles, but within the context of their workaday lives and labor shop floor struggles. And that’s why I was interviewing railroad workers a few years ago, nonstop, all of whom were telling me that there was a crisis on the freight rail system. I talked to engineers, I talked to dispatchers, I talked to the folks who maintain the track, right? And all of them were saying some version of the same thing, which is that corporate greed has destroyed this vital element of our supply chain, and it is putting all of us workers, residents, and our planet at Hazard, and they were screaming for someone to listen to them, and they were demanding of those companies and of their government and of the public that we support them.

And instead, as we all know, a little over two years ago, Joe Biden and both parties in Congress worked together to block railroad workers from going on strike, forced a contract down their throats and basically told them to shut up and go away. Two months later, east Palestine happened, a Norfolk southern bomb train derailed in Hilary’s backyard, and then three days later, the Norfolk Southern pressured local authorities to make the disastrous and unnecessary decision to vent and burn five cars worth of toxic vinyl chloride, spewing a massive black death plume into the air that we all remember seeing Hilary and her neighbors lived it, and they are still living in it. I mean, I think one thing that we want to emphasize here and that’s going to come out in the stories of our incredible panelists is that maybe you heard about the issues that they’re dealing with in the past, and then it faded from the headlines.

That does not mean the issue has gone away. In fact, quite the opposite is true in most cases. But that doesn’t mean there haven’t been wins and struggle, and we want to make space to talk about that as well. But I really want to emphasize first and foremost that when communities are sacrificed for the sake of corporate profits or government negligence or what have you, I mean, these are people’s lives. These are communities that are destroyed and then forgotten. And as a journalist investigating and talking to folks living in these areas, what I’m realizing is we’re going to run out of places to forget. And so it breaks my heart going from East Palestine to South Baltimore to communities around the country talking to folks who feel so forgotten yet who are dealing so many of the same problems caused by the same villains. And so really, we’re here to talk about what we as fellow workers, as neighbors can do to band together to put a stop to this, to get justice and to build a world in which this kind of thing is not only unthinkable, but it sure as hell isn’t as normalized as it is today.

And so with all that upfront, I want to shut up and really just have you all listen more to the incredible women I’m sitting next to. I want us in the first half of this to just sort of talk a bit more for listeners and folks here about your story, about where you come from, about the kind of issues that you all are dealing with in your own respective communities. Because each has its own specificities. Every community is different. And then in the second half, I want us to talk about the significance of all of us being here together, of what y’all have seen in Baltimore, what discussions you’re getting into and what we can do to fight these corporate villains, wall Street monsters and corporate politicians who are destroying the planet upon which we all depend. So with all that upfront, Angie, I wanted to turn it back over to you since you are home based here in Baltimore. Tell us a bit more about yourself and about the struggle going on in Curtis Bay for folks who maybe haven’t heard about it yet.

Angela Shaneyfelt:

I grew up not in Curtis Bay or Brooklyn, I grew up just a little bit south of there in Anne Arundel County in Pasadena, a suburb of Baltimore City. And honestly, when I was younger, I said I would never live in the city, ever. And here I am 16 years later in the city that I said I would never live in. When I first moved to Curtis Bay, I never even thought about the coal other than it’s getting in my house. And I opened my windows the first year I lived there. And then after that first year, I was like, what is this black dust in my house and where is it coming from? And so we figured out that it was from the coal pile that’s two blocks, three blocks, city blocks down from where I live, just wafting into my house any way it could get in.

And so that’s when I just didn’t for 15 now years that I’ve not opened my windows at all. And then never, still didn’t pay attention to it honestly. And then December 30th happened, 2021, and literally I felt the sonic didn’t know what it was, did the mental checks looking around, and my kids were in the living room with me. My husband was on his way to Dunking Donuts. I had Covid, my daughter had covid, so we couldn’t go outside. He was going for coffee and we felt the pressure from the boom, didn’t hear anything yet. And I’m just looking around, what is it? My kids are looking at me for direction they didn’t know. And then we heard it and it shook our house. There’s neighbors that had windows blown out from this explosion. And then I looked at my daughter and she, one doesn’t, even before this, never really dealt well with loud noises or balloons.

And I’m looking at her and she literally wasn’t there. And my kids were around seven or eight at the time, so I had to tap on her chin three times to get her to come back to normal. And in that couple minutes time, I had to do the checks. The electricity’s still on. My windows are intact, and I live in Baltimore, so there’s nobody shooting outside my house. So we’re okay, but I don’t know what happened. And so then after the explosion, initial explosion happened, I go outside what we do here in Baltimore, go outside and talk to neighbors.

We didn’t get any alerts at all from any government agency, but word on the street what we go by a lot of times in South Baltimore because kind of the forgotten part of Baltimore City word on the street was there’s no threat to the community. But if you go outside and we found this out hours later from news and whatever, if you go outside, wear a mask, now it’s 2021 and we’re in the middle of a pandemic, of course we’re going to wear a mask, but why are you telling me to wear a mask if I go outside if there’s no threat to the community, like one plus one equals two in my world and that doesn’t add up. So with C, I lost my sense of smell and taste, and I had a mask on anyway, I was coming back inside because it was don’t go outside.

I had the worst suer and rotten egg smell that I’ve ever smelled in my life without a sense of smell and a mask on. So I don’t know, I can only imagine what a normal person at that point would’ve been smelling in our neighborhood. And so then my husband comes back and I literally was shuffling him inside because go inside, don’t be outside. And he had no clue. He was driving up the hill when the initial blast happened to the point where he felt like the car tires were lifting up off the ground and he stopped when he made the turn off of the street right next to ours and to check the tires to make sure there was still air in the tires. And that’s just one explosion. There’s been a history of explosions from CSX and they initially didn’t know it wasn’t us.

We’ve heard different things like it’s not our coal that is in our neighborhood, that is in your neighborhood. It comes from across the water in Ock, but your coal doesn’t leave the terminal. We’re breathing in somebody else’s coal. They tried to say it wasn’t coal. Well, what is it? Black dust. And now the community with the help of some scientists from John Hopkins have done the research, which we shouldn’t have to do. Honestly, we shouldn’t have to do that. The MDE and EPA should be doing their job. That’s their job, not our job to protect us as a community and as a city.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And just to clarify for folks listening, y’all heard the episodes that we’ve done in the past with Angie and her neighbors in South Baltimore, and what we’re talking about here is the massive open air like coal terminal that is owned and operated by CSX rail, multi-billion dollar rail company that these uncovered coal cars have been coming in and out of that terminal for decades over a century. So we’re talking about the explosion that happened at the cult pier that Angie was referring to, but as you’ll hear later on in the conversation, and as y’all remember from our past episodes based on South Baltimore, this is sadly only one of many polluters poisoning Angie and her community.

Elise Keaton Wade:

So my name is Elise Keaton again, Elise Keaton Wade. It’s tough when you get married later in life, confuses things and complicates things. I said in my introduction that I got started with my environmental activism in college because I had to go away to college to learn about the environmental degradation happening in my backyard. And imagine my surprise at 19 years old when I’m sitting in an Appalachian studies course in Virginia Tech and I hear the words mountaintop removal for the very first time in my life, and I’m like, what are we talking about? And that visceral reaction to something so wrong, and that journey over the last 25 years has landed me in places where really tragic things are happening. For example, I graduated law school the year that Katrina happened. I was in the evacuation from Houston, from Rita where more people died in the evacuation from Rita than died in Katrina.

And that’s a little known fact, right? The entire city of Houston tried to leave within 36 hours and we sat for 28 hours going nowhere. But my policy mind was always at work in those instances, what is the policy that got us here? What is happening? Why am I staring at a bridge? And I was naive. I don’t know who said it earlier about being a naive high school student, but I thought it was a great statement that I’m a student. Of course I’m naive. I don’t know what’s going on right in my naivete, I thought this hurricane was going to be something that’s shone the light on all of these policy issues. This hurricane was going to show that we weren’t able to evacuate in a big way very quickly from some mass event. What if it wasn’t a hurricane? What if it wasn’t explosion or a chemical plant or some trained derailment with deadly chemicals going into the air?

We are ill-equipped across the board to deal with those types of things. That was in 2005, right? What the hell have we been doing? What have we been doing? Where is our plan? Right? So now, okay, it’s 2014. No, it’s not today. You’re glad I drank the espresso, I’m telling you. So it’s 2024 and in West Virginia right now what we’re dealing with is poisoned water in Indian Creek in Wyoming County because the coal companies are going back into the coal mines for the methane, the coal bed methane that’s down there. And one way they’re trying to figure out how to get it out of there is to flush it out with water.

Well, they’ve found out pretty quickly, that’s a terrible idea, but they continued to do it and continued to pollute. It’s been about a year and a half, maybe close to two years that this community has been aware of this, and they’re just now acknowledging that they have an issue. And yesterday they withdrew their permits to continue this practice. It was because hashtag Appalachian living on TikTok, my girlfriend Lindsay Riser who’s out there beating the drum every day, calling out the hypocrisy, telling people, why are you not talking about the industry that’s poisoning us? At the same time, we have a solid candidate coming out of that district. This is my Senate district, my state Senate District nine. She is a 35 year member of Teachers union. She started teaching right out of high school. She is from our community. She’s been a teacher for decades. She is pro West Virginia. She got involved in politics because one of her children is transgender, and she had to sit in our legislature and listen to them abuse transgender individuals with their legislation. It triggered her into action. The UMWA United Mine Workers Association, the union that we wear our bandanas to remember and to support supported her candidacy in the primary. They’re supporting her Republican opponent in the general.

Now out of respect for her, I’m going to wait until after the election to address this issue, but this issue will be addressed because of East Palestine. East Palestine is the reason that I am involved again in these issues. When Nikki brought me to East Palestine and I heard what really happened and the fact that very few news outlets were actually telling us the real news about what was happening up there, I realize it’s never going to stop. They are never going to stop doing this to us. The only people who have ever shown up for our communities are the people within our communities. And unless we’re there making other people show up, they don’t come. They’re not trying to help us and find out what’s going on. It is up to us every single time I’ve been around long enough to know Katrina, Rita, name your disaster, right?

It’s not changing and it’s unacceptable. It is disastrous and unnecessary to quote our host. And so when you find yourself in these systems and these situations where you are somewhat powerless as an individual, right? I can stand up and scream all night long and it’s not going to get anything done, but I can work in regional coordination and support the people who are in these different areas because those trains roll through my community. The coal in your bay came from my mountains in West Virginia that we have stood on as activists. They’re blowing mountains apart. Those mountains filter clean water. That’s a very shortsighted plan, don’t you think? So everything that happens in Appalachia, in West Virginia, in East Palestine, in Baltimore, this is all coordinated together and us talking to each other and having in these gatherings and committing to supporting each other regionally is their biggest fear because we’re recognizing our power and we’re using it. So I don’t know, that’s exactly the question you asked, but it felt good while I was saying it, so I’m going to stick with it. All right. Alright, with

Maximillian Alvarez:

Nah, sister, preach. Everything you guys say is incredible and important. I only picked the mic back up just to note and make a very grim footnote for listeners, because we just published another installment of this series where I spoke to two folks on the ground in Asheville, North Carolina providing mutual aid and trying to repair their destroyed community, their destroyed region, and something that Byron Ballard, who’s there working at a church and doing great work, said that really stuck with me. If you’re trying to see the connections here, not only through manmade climate change and all the ways that that is making these massive hurricanes bigger, more destructive and going and destroying parts of Western North Carolina for Pete’s sake, but what she said, because we’ve seen those pictures of towns that have been wiped off the map, mudslides that have taken towns off the map that have killed families. She said mountaintop removal made those mudslides a lot worse. So just really wanted to drive that home. If you think that these are distinct issues that aren’t going to come back and combine in monstrous ways they already are. Melanie, please hop in.

Melanie Meade:

Thank you Max. In Clariton. In 2005, I was successfully working at American University in Bowie State. I was part-time adjunct professor in Spanish. I was so proud to have my job. I went home to a Clairton reunion we have during Labor Day and I woke up the next morning in the hospital being diagnosed with what is called nocturnal epilepsy. That emergency doctor did not tell me what it came from and no other doctor could find it whenever they did scans of my brain. But then in 2013, when I came home to bury my father, I met a gentleman named Dave Smith and he was working for Clean Air Council and he had taught me about the campaign leaders of 10 and he said, Melanie, get 10 friends and tell them to each get one friend and let’s start talking about our shared issues. In 2018, fires burned the size of three football fields for 17 days before the mayor and Health Department informed us little black boys because they’re typically outside and want to be outside and play outside. We’re five times more affected according to a doctor’s report. Then we came to find out months later that everyone’s health was harmed who live within 10 miles of the USX Claritin K works.

And we didn’t get the right help, nor did we know what kind of help we needed. So there were people who came in to say they were helping, but we never really found out the truth. And it disturbed me to find out that those fires burned again in 2019 total of over 100 days, and it wasn’t on the news anymore. Hilary and I are very close, so we’re not in competition, but I felt like USX was in control of the media. There was a stop and desist with USXK works to talk about the trains, and those trains come through clariton as well. I can hear them all through the night and day.

That’s where I realized we have to remain connected. We have to tell our stories, we have to have real news. We have to have real journalists that report the truth according to what we have experienced because it can’t be done any other way. And I’m just really encouraged to have you all to look, to call on and come together like this because this is helpful and it’s healing to know that our work is meaningful and it will result in something. So I just continue to thank you for real news. I continue to thank Curtis Bay for sharing your stories. I continue to thank Hilary. I continue to thank Elise, Dr. Fabricant, all of you who are here because you are the wind beneath my wings, not having my parents or siblings. It can be a lonely place, but you fill those voids for me and I’m so very grateful for you all and I’m so very grateful that we can say let’s blow stuff up.

Hilary Flint:

I just want to start off by something I feel like is not spoken about enough is that East Palestine did get a lot of media coverage, especially in the beginning, right? We were on all the news stations and it was this big plume, but I genuinely think it’s not because USX is not allowing media to do things. I think it’s because we’re a predominantly white community, and I’m going to be super frank about that. Myself and two other community members were able to meet President Biden within a year of the trained derailment. And I have to see black leaders in Louisiana and in Texas who have been doing this fight for 40 plus years, 50 years, and they do not get proximity to the White House. They get nowhere near it. So I just want to start with that because I think we talk about East Palestine a lot and it’s like, yeah, we got the media coverage because it was a white community and it was not only that, it’s a very conservative area.

So it was a flashier news story than, oh, we’ve been poisoning people for 40 years. It was different. And that’s what was different about it is that we were a white, small rural community. And I try to do the work that now we can bring people with us because one thing about your whiteness is I can’t get rid of it, but what I can do is utilize it to then make sure that now the White House is contacting other communities because it’s disgusting to me that you feel this guilt that day that myself and other community members met with President Biden, I had the most extreme guilt because it was like we did this in a year and through that year I was connecting with communities all over the United States that went through environmental disasters. And I had to think like, oh, you expect, oh wow, that’s so cool.

You did that in one year. And so part of it, you do have that little bit of pride and you’re like, yeah, that’s awesome. And then you’re like, but why could I do that? Watching these other women, and by the way, it’s usually women, it’s usually female activists. I’m watching them and I heard Melanie speak one day and I was like, that is a fierce woman. And if Melanie Mead isn’t getting the help that she needs, then there is something wrong with the system. And that’s what this solidarity building is. It’s so important. But I did want to talk about the day of the derailment and how people think it is the derailment. That’s the problem. I refer to this as the East Palestinian trained derailment and chemical disaster because the derailment is just a piece of the puzzle. And yes, there was all these chemicals and there was fires, but it really wasn’t until a couple of days later when they burned the vinyl chloride that my community was affected.

So we know this as the East Palestine trained around it, but it’s directly on the border where this happened. Pennsylvania is right there, and other communities outside of East Palestine were affected and will be affected down the line, but it would not be as bad as it will be that vinyl chloride changed the game. So that’s the mushroom cloud that everyone saw. And I remember that day very distinctly because I was convinced I was glued to the news thinking they’re going to evacuate us. Of course they are. East Palestine at that point had been under evacuation. It was a one by two mile radius, but where I lived, you could see the smoke. So I’m thinking they’re going to have to evacuate us. And so then I’m watching the TV and I see, oh, my little brother’s school, they’re sending the kids home and our school is way further away from East Palestine than our physical home.

So I’m thinking, oh, okay, they’re sending the kids home so then we can evacuate as families. He gets home and we’re waiting and we’re waiting and we’re seeing, I’m watching the press conference on the news. They’re saying, alright, at three 30 we’re going to blow this up. And the call that we were looking for never came. We were never going to be evacuated. It was just a one by two mile radius. Now we’re over a year out and there is proof that this plume traveled to 16 different states. So imagine a one by two mile radius. Us, my family chose to self evacuate. We did it very last minute. I had my go-bag prepped. My Italian grandma was like, I’m not leaving my house. So last minute we got Mimi. We got Mimi in the car. She was the last one. But as we were driving away and we had no idea where we were going by the way, it was just like, you just have to get away.

And I look in the rear view mirror and that’s when they blew it up. So it felt like I was a storm chaser running away from a tornado or something. That’s what it felt like. And you see it. And at that moment, my dog just started barking like crazy, just barking like crazy. And I think they have a more sensitive smell and things like that. And we just kept driving and I’m like, where are we going by the way? So I don’t know. I had family in another town. So we went and I was sat in my cousin’s driveway for hours. She wasn’t home. And then I was like, well, I guess we’re going to have to get a hotel. Because once we saw what it looked like, some of my neighbors that had stayed behind at the farm next door to me and took pictures, I was shocked.

People were alive. It was black. The whole area was just black smoke. I couldn’t imagine that was safe to go home to. So we did end up getting a hotel. It was the last hotel book. We are small communities. Guess what? We don’t have a lot of hotel rooms available and the National Guard there. And we were checking in kind of at the same time. And so I had asked this man in full uniform, I said, we weren’t supposed to be evacuated, but we did anyway. What would you have done in that situation? And he said, ma’am, if it was up to me, I wouldn’t even be here right now. So this is someone in full uniform who came to respond to the crisis, who understood how dangerous it was. And at that point we were like 15 miles away and he didn’t even want to be there.

And the next day they say everything’s fine, everyone can go home. And I remember I had a business trip that I had to go back, pack my bag, and then go to the airport. The minute we opened the door of our home, I knew everything had changed. It was a smell that I had never sm smelled before. I couldn’t even find the correct words to describe it except sweet bleach. It was a chemical smell, but it also smelled sugary. And within a few minutes we had health symptoms. I mean, it did not take long. So I have some preexisting health conditions. I have chronic illness, and one of the diseases that I have is called rainy odds. And in rayons it causes blood vessel constriction. So you turn purple. Now, I’ve always had rayons since I was little. My hands would turn purple, but I’d never had it go beyond that.

And all of a sudden I look down, my feet are purple, everything is turning purple. And it wasn’t until later I find out that their vinyl chloride is one of the known triggers of that particular disease. And when we’re told it’s safe to go home, my question is, who is it safe for? It’s not safe for everyone. It’s not safe for people with asthma. It’s not safe with for people with preexisting conditions, but that is what we operate off of. It’s a blanket statement of, oh, it’s safe. That’s not true. It wasn’t safe for me. And then I had to get on a plane and leave my family and say, oh, I had to go to work. And so I was on this work trip and just, I smelled, there was a smell that lingered. So I get off the plane, I was flying to California and my boss and I are meeting at the airport and I go to hug him and he goes, Ooh, why do you smell like that?

It came with me to California. And that smell traveled with me for a full year. I had to leave all my clothes behind. I had to leave mattresses. You couldn’t take anything that was a soft surface because this chemical smell lived in it. And no matter how many times you washed it, it didn’t matter. And it got to the point where it became embarrassing because you had a smell. My partner also has chronic illness, and the smell would make him sick just from me being in his home. And it got to the point where when I would go over, I would have to get completely naked at the door, get in a shower, shut my clothes in a basement. I would have to shower, I would’ve to put on different clothes that I had to buy to keep there. And it was so I didn’t feel like a human.

And I remember at one point I was crying. I was so upset, I was so tired. And I was like, I can’t believe I have to go through this whole ritual, this decontamination ritual. And I just remember him saying, it’s not you, honey, it’s the chemicals. I’m like, I don’t know that. That makes me feel that much better, right? Yeah. He would get nosebleeds just from being around my suitcase. And so about six months in, I ended up, I worked two jobs until I could afford to move. Because when they tell you to just move, it actually doesn’t work like that, especially if you were exposed to a chemical. So now all of your belongings, you can’t take them with you. And so when I did move, I finally got a place, I was on an air mattress. Me and my grandma were sharing an air mattress on the ground.

There was no furniture. I just got a couch. And I’ve been there for over a year at this point, because you are rebuilding, you were starting over again. And so I’ve had to work from the crack of dawn until it’s dark out. And that’s what I had to do to move. And that’s a privilege, right? Not everyone even has that privilege. That’s pretty shocking. I can do that as a disabled person. But I look at people with families. My family is a small, well, small business owner, but we own a lot of acreage. And my parents want to move. But when you have 10,000 acres and you have a business based on tourism, and guess what? You can’t sell it. So where are you going to go? And you can’t pull equity out of your house. So they’re stuck. I could just up and move.

I didn’t have the business. I didn’t have this and that. So now my grandma and I, we lived in the home. My great-grandmother built on the land that my family originally lived on. My parents built a house in the backyard. I had moved back home because I had cancer. And I was a young adult and I couldn’t financially recover unless I did that. My plan was I live back with my grandma and then I build a house in the backyard. Cause we have 40 acres, we have our own little commune. That can’t happen now. There’s no way we used to lease farm land. And how can we ethically do that? How can we ethically, if you have farmers who want to farm that land, is that ethical? Is it ethical to sell your home? So right now, we just have our home sitting there because we don’t feel comfortable selling it.

And I had someone who was a lawyer be like, oh, actually you can, it’s okay. And I said, I’m not actually asking about the law here. I’m talking about ethics. Can I sell this home so that some little kid someday gets angiosarcoma, which is the cancer that vinyl chloride is tied to? So in the beginning, I was kind of the person behind the scenes organizing, I don’t really like to do stuff like this. I’m the person who likes to prep people for these things. And about six months in, I realized I was going to have to do this and step up. And so we had a grassroots group that we started just like a volunteer. We weren’t a nonprofit, we weren’t anything. And people always said like, oh, why didn’t you become a nonprofit right away? And I said, oh, because we didn’t want the rules.

So we did have some civil disobedience in the beginning. That’s how I met Robin and David. They went to the Ohio State Capitol with us. And we didn’t storm the capitol, but we had people go sit in a session and stand up and say, remember he is Palestine. My kid’s nose is bleeding. And let me tell you, once you go back to your community after you do something like that, things don’t go well. Small, rural conservative communities aren’t really into that kind of thing. But it was effective. And the reason we went when we did was one thing we thought that could help us was a major disaster declaration because we didn’t even get a state of emergency. It opened up this problem that because there was a company who was the reason this happened, the liability was with that company and it wasn’t a natural disaster.

So there was just so many things behind the scenes that they couldn’t figure out how to classify the disaster essentially to give us the government services we needed. But we thought a major disaster declaration would help. In the beginning had started a petition. We had over 20,000 signatures. And then it was the next day it was, if the governor didn’t ask President Biden for that, then you could never get it. And so we went because we knew we had to put pressure on Ohio’s governor to win Pennsylvania’s governor. I found out couldn’t even call that disaster declaration because it physically didn’t happen. So where an accident happens is really important apparently. So we went and we put the pressure on, and guess what? The next day DeWine did ask for the disaster declaration. So it worked to the whole community hated us after that. And I mean, still to this day, Facebook groups terrify me like what they’re saying about us, but it’s what we had to do.

And that’s what I’ve realized. Some of these decisions I have to make in this work is like, I have to do this and I’m not going to be liked after, and I have to do this in a way that I can stay in the work too. So maybe sometimes that means not organizing as close to home. I learned that federal policy actually can help us a lot more than talking to my representatives when they tell you, oh, talk to your representatives, talk to your counsel. That is true in some cases, but in this case, that wasn’t true. So a lot of my work has been about going to the very top and figuring out what we can get from the government. And unfortunately, it doesn’t happen quick. It does not happen quick. And so by the time we are going to get the things we’re fighting for, people are going to be sick.

There’s already people sick. There’s people with rare forms of breast cancer. There’s young girls getting their period super early. There’s respiratory issues. I was hospitalized multiple times. My sibling was life-flighted multiple times. My three-year-old sister has obstructive sleep apnea, which only happened after the derailment. So the system was horrible. And that’s kind of what I’m trying to change. And we found out when we did get to meet at the White House, something I had asked later, I said to them, what got us here? What was the difference maker? And they actually said, we noticed you were working with other communities and other industries. And they talked about the fact that we were working with labor, we were working with unions, and then they found out that we’ve been working with the Gulf South and we were working in West Virginia. And that scared them. It should.

And that got us in the door. And that’s why I think what we’re doing here is more important than anything we could do because this is what scares them. People coming together and realizing it’s not left versus right. It’s not Republican versus liberal. It is us versus them. And we are the people. We’re the everyday people. It’s us versus the billionaires in the systems and that’s scaring them. So we have to keep doing this in other communities because this is what gets the attention. Sometimes it’s not the rallies or the op-eds, sometimes it’s them simply understanding your network. So anytime I go to another community, I was in Louisiana at a public meeting and someone from industry said, oh, who are you and why are you here? And I said, oh, we all work together. And they were like, oh no. So letting industry know like, oh yeah, I know Elise in West Virginia. I know Nikki in Baltimore, and that’s really scary to them.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, let’s talk about that. Let’s go back around the table before we open it up to q and a. And I want to acknowledge that as y’all had laid out, and as Hilary, you were talking through some of the gains that you made by not going away. And I know that that has happened in your respective communities. Y’all are true heroes, love warriors for justice because you refuse to go away. And in that way, you were also an inspiration to all of us. So I want to acknowledge the fact that here in South Baltimore, y’all got together high school students, folks from Johns Hopkins doing community science to provide the proof that CSX without which CSX could keep on saying, no, that black shit in your home is not us, must be something else. So that’s a victory. But yet they’re still denying culpability. Their operational permits still up for renewal in coal country, right?

It’s like, oh, well, we stopped mining coal, now we’re fracking the shit out of everything and still poisoning the water that way. So I say this by way of asking if in our final turnaround the table, if y’all could say a little bit about what the communities have been doing and achieving through struggle, but also what this week has shown us in regards to as valiant and essential as those local efforts are to take on these international corporations. We need solidarity that’s operating at the level that they are and what we can do working together, building on what Hilary kind of got us started on. So yeah, could you say a little bit about what y’all and your communities have achieved and have been working towards, but also where you’re seeing that that’s not enough and that we need to band together to take this fight to the higher level higher.

Elise Keaton Wade:

So I want to start this. Can you hear me okay? I want to start this because their fights are more current in time than mine, and I want to kind of build on what Hilary said and then hand it to them to talk about their current struggles. But now you understand why Palestine at Palestine set me back on fire right now. You understand that I got there and realized that everything I’d seen wasn’t true. They were misleading the rest of the world about what happened there. And it wasn’t until I sat in the room and heard these people talk about why the people with no marks on their skin or their hair falling out were the ones who got to go into the White House, how they divided the community. And I stood next to my friend Dustin White who is here tonight with me.

He was at that meeting and the entire time they were talking about how that community and how the officials responded in that disaster. We were looking at each other across the room. That’s exactly what they did in 2014 at the Elk River Chemical disaster in West Virginia. The leak spill, whatever, nearly verbatim responses. And then the split, you have a coalition of people and we cobbled ourselves together. And now they’re going to pick and choose who they bring into the room so that when you leave that room, there’s division within your community. They did exactly the same thing to us. And I sat there with my jaw on the floor and they’re going to keep doing it to every community. There’s their standard playbook. So yes, what scares them is that we talk to each other now that we stand in solidarity with each other, that I go and raise hell with the union in West Virginia for our railroad brothers and sisters in East Palestine who stood for two months and screamed about the safety issues on this railroad, screamed to the people in this country about what was happening and what was going to happen if they didn’t shut it down and address it.

And we told ’em to sit down and shut up because our economy needed those trains to roll. Now, if you’ve been with me for the past couple of days, I’ve been on a bit of a diatribe about the failed economic theory of capitalism. Happy to go into that more on another podcast Max. But this is a great example.

This is a great example of why it doesn’t work, because if it worked in theory, they would’ve taken as long as they needed to clean up that mess because it would’ve been what was safe and best for the community and for making sure that the altruistic idea of what happened happened. That’s not what happened in West Virginia. If they cared about the community and the long-term effects, they would’ve addressed the issues that caused that chemical spill, which are mountaintop removal and contamination of local water sources from coal mining and chemical production. If they care, they don’t care. The only people who have ever shown up for us are us. The only people who have ever shown up for us are us. And then we have to support each other. Don’t let them divide us. Don’t let them go back and forth. So I want to step back and just say that the fact that it has become more egregious, they are pushing that boundary, right?

They are pushing it constantly and they will continue. Every community in this country has a train rail through it. This could be Hinton, this could be any town that has a railway through it. And what are they going to do? They’re going to destroy your lives with their contamination and they’re going to point fingers at each other and they’re going to point fingers at you and tell you it’s really not as bad as you say it is, because how do you know it wasn’t the nail polish you were wearing that caused the toxicity in your body?

Yeah, that’s what they told me. Do you wear nail polish? Do you color your hair? Well, how do you know you didn’t poison yourself? Do you smoke cigarettes? Do you drink soda West Virginia? Maybe you’re the problem. I want to say one thing about the myth of the inbred hillbilly, because this is one of my favorite things to talk about in broad groups, and I think it goes back a long time in our history, and I know everybody’s heard about the inbred hillbilly. If you haven’t heard about the inbred hillbilly, raise your hand. This is so diffused throughout our culture, right? Well, I went into the world carrying the identity of the hillbilly that had to do better. I had to prove that we’re not all inbred, that some of us aren’t. So I let them tell me who I was. I accepted their identity of who they told me I, I carried it with me into the world espousing it.

I came back to West Virginia because I love my state. I wanted to come back and do the good things that I’d learned out there that nobody taught me here, come back here and do those good works. And when I got back here with a little bit of perspective and context and some world experience, I realize that may be the biggest hoax of the 20th century. Because what happens when you live next to unregulated pollutants? You have high instances of birth defects, cancers deadly diseases. You die young, you die sick. You have offspring that are compromised and sick and young. And 150 years ago, all of these toxins were going unchecked into the community. And what better way to marginalize that community than they say, well, don’t look at that ugliness. They inbred and they changed the narrative and they framed a region for decades. The myth of the inbred hillbilly is still carried forward.

So it is on purpose. It is deliberate. If they can tell you who you are and what you’ve done to f your life up, then they’re not responsible. So don’t let them gaslight you. Stand firm and speak your truth to power because you’re right at the end of the day. You’re right. And what did Larry Gibson teach us? Teach us while we stood on Payford Mountain? If you’re telling the truth, what are you afraid of? Speak your truth to power and stand firm. And you’ve got brothers and sisters in West Virginia standing with you and you’ve got brothers and sisters in Pennsylvania standing with you. You’ve got brothers and sisters in Curtis Bay standing with you. So thank you for standing up East Palestine, we are with you in this. Thank you.

Angela Shaneyfelt:

Thank all of you. And I’m so, so glad that we’re sitting all here in this room together tonight because Curtis Bay, we’re at a point right now. We’re pushing. We’re getting the attention that East Palestine got. And I mean, I said it two years ago at a rally. Let’s take this to Annapolis and to dc. We’re so close to DC that we can’t stop fighting the fight. And it’s not for us. It’s for my kids who are in middle school right now. And my daughter joined us today for as long as she could hang, and she got up on the steps and she said her, she was awesome. And we have the higher cancer rates in Curtis Bay, like asthma rates. I never had asthma growing up. And I found out I had asthma in 2020 in the hospital for surgery. And they’re like, this is your breathing treatment. And I’m like, breathing treatment for what? Nobody ever told me I had asthma.

And we have been fighting. We’ve been going to city council. And at one point they didn’t listen, but then we kept fighting and we kept calling the news. And Max, thank you for starting the whole podcast thing and just getting the word out. I’ve gone through times. I mean, the fight is a marathon. It’s not a sprint. And I’ve had my own thoughts. What am I doing this for? I doing it. And I just, I’m so grateful right now that I’m sitting in this room with you guys because we’ve gotten to a point where what is our next step? And I’ve even said it along the way. There’s this lull of large numbers, and I see it happening right now. I didn’t know any of you guys before today. So I knew Nikki for a few years and I never would’ve ever imagined before 2021 that I would ever be sitting in circles that I’m sitting in now. And now I’m 16 years ago, I wanted to be out of Curtis Bay as fast as possible no matter what. And then kids happen. And Curtis Bay is where I can afford to live in all honesty. And in two years, I’m like ready to, the plan is to buy a house. Is it going to be in Curtis Bay? A hundred percent, no. But I’m invested now. So even if I move out, I’m still coming back to keep the fight going and keep the story going, to make the change because that’s what I need to do.

Melanie Meade:

My father taught at the University of Pittsburgh, Dr. Thomas Vme. He passed in 2013. And the reason he stayed in Clariton is because the family land that we had called Randolph Hollow was taken over for mill housing and he felt like it was worth it to sacrifice his life and his health so that our history could not be forgotten. And so when I hear Hilary stand in solidarity, and the new friend I have in Curtis Bay stand in solidarity, Elise and Dr. Nikki standing in solidarity with me, I know that I’m on the right path. I know that I have not forgotten my history, who I am and what I’m capable of. And I think each and every one of you are fierce in your own way. And it is so wonderful that we have this opportunity because we need it. We need to check in with ourselves, check in with others, because we are the ones showing up for ourselves, as Elisa said. And I need each and every one of you for the long haul. So thank you again, and let’s keep doing the work.

Hilary Flint:

To go off of what Melanie said, it’s stuff like this that keeps me in the work. So that’s a question I ask myself a lot, and I see other activists and I think, what do they need to stay in the work? What do I need to stay in the work? And every once in a while it’s going to a community and getting inspired by their wins. I noticed how closely the communities here, the EJ conversation is happening with housing injustice and you’re talking about racial justice, and we don’t see a lot of that in our corner of Appalachia. That type of solidarity building doesn’t happen. And so I get to leave and be really inspired by that. I have been working with a group of folks from the Gulf South, and we’re talking about creating an area where climate refugees can live. So I’m looking at the passive housing and I’m thinking, oh, interesting. And I bet a funder would fund something like that. So I get to think about those different ways of doing the work. And we just don’t celebrate joy very much in Appalachia, unfortunately.

And to see the positivity and the solutions, I got to see solutions to problems instead of just problems where we are just stuck in the doom and gloom. So for me, coming to this, this is what keeps me in the work. It keeps me going, but then as most people know, I’m a homebody. So I’ll go home and you won’t see me for three weeks now because this social battery, but we all have, that’s such an important lesson. As an activist, what are your boundaries? What keeps you in the work? What are you comfortable in and what are not? What type of hate are you willing to put up with? What’s going to cross the line for you? It can get really bad. I always say being an activist is choosing to be a target, and not only to industry, but sometimes community, sometimes politicians.

So again, it’s like what’s going to keep me in the work creating solutions to some of those problems? So something we’ve been trying to do is, again, bring mutual aid into the work. Because what we found out is in East Palestine and Beaver County, they go, oh, well there’s not property damage and there’s not this and there’s not that. So no one’s coming to help you because you don’t fit in a box. And mutual aid is the answer to that, right? It’s community care. It’s, we’re not looking for a box to check off on a grant. You tell me you need a mattress, we get you a mattress. And so how do we make sure that that’s present in the nonprofit industry? So we are fighting really hard to get mutual aid funds set up at small grassroots nonprofits that are just meant for answering community need, peer support.

So something that we’re working on is building up mental health resources within the movement. And what does it look to make sure other nonprofits are trauma informed, because what I saw was a lot of groups coming in and taking advantage of people, and I was expected to tell my story of my battle with cancer, and then I turned purple and I wasn’t getting paid for any of that. So something that I’ve been doing is I call people out and I say, you can build paying community members into a grant. And so we do it with everything. We build that money into a grant. And I did a video project where I made sure we paid everyone and paid them well. And this one funder said, that’s revolutionary. We don’t do that. And I said, paying people for their work is revolutionary. I said, and we are the progressive industry.

No, we’re not. So thinking about what does care look like in every aspect, because we are not going to stay in this fight. And as we’ve seen it as a long fight, if we don’t think about those things and we’re just, I’m an action oriented person, I’m like, I got to keep going. I got to keep going. And so that gets tiring. And it’s like sometimes I need Melanie to be like, Hilary, have you checked in with yourself today? Are you doing your self care? And we don’t always get that in our own community because when you’re fighting so closely together, people want to do the work differently. And there’s just so much division going on. The minute I decided that I was going to meet the president and then continue a relationship with politicians, it was, she’s been bought off.

We can’t trust her anymore. And I had to be okay with that and say, that’s fine. I’m going to work silently. I’m going to get done what I know is going to work because I have been with all of these people now for a year. I know what the needs are and I don’t need to be liked anymore, but I do need to be liked by someone. So that’s where activists come in. They remind me, okay, Hilary, you’re loved and respected in some just not your own home right now. So, okay. So it builds that friendship. And when I get to come and be with Melanie, or even I work very closely with Robin at home, and just to have people that keep filling you up, even if it’s just a couple people in the community, a couple people in different neighborhoods, or when you go through a really heavy situation and no one in your community can relate to it, I can say, Hey Melanie, have you ever experienced this?

What does it mean? Can you just be my friend right now and talk me through it? No one else gets it in the community. So again, there’s nothing more important than the solidarity building that we’re doing right now. It’s what scares them. I heard it from the highest up mouth that I could find in the United States. This is what scares them. So the more we do it, the more we win. Especially when it comes to public hearings, public comment periods, vinyl chloride, the chemical that ruined my home on October 23rd, you have until October 23rd to submit a public comment about what you think about that chemical, should it be banned. They’ve known since the 1970s that it was a carcinogen. It was the reason the EPA started something called tosca. Yet it has yet to be banned by tosca. This is the first year it’s up to be banned.

Just letting each other know, Hey, I have a public comment period. I would really appreciate it. Because then guess what? They look and they go, oh crap. They got all these public comments from Pennsylvania. They’ve hit every state. Now we’re going to have to do something no longer. Oh no, we poisoned this one community. We poisoned this one community. And they talk to this other poison community, and they talk to this house that has these people that have been dealing with racism. And then they talk to these people that are dealing with transgender rights and they go, oh, so reminding each other, we have some group chats that’ll be like, Hey guys, public comment period here. Submit. And just finding ways to engage with each other outside of this stuff is really important. Mutual aid fundraisers, some people I meet will have a chat where we’re just like, oh, here’s a GoFundMe.

Everyone send $5. And it doesn’t ruin my day to send someone $5 at this point. So it’s like, it’s so simple. But if you keep building out these networks and someone has a crisis, and I know people all over the United States, we can get a lot of money. I think we got $3,000 and not even 24 hours. And that’s just like us being random people. It wasn’t a part of our work. It’s just like you can get it because your network is big and your relationships are the work. And if people trust you, they’re going to donate to that. They trust you. So this is how we win

Melanie Meade:

In all aspects. Relationships are the work is powerful. And hills is,

Hilary Flint:

It wasn’t me, my colleague Andrew Wooer said it the first time, and I’ll never forget it because I don’t like emotional labor. I am someone who I don’t feel often. I just want to do. I want to solve problems. I want to keep going. And so I was getting so upset that people would be crying and I didn’t know what to do. I’m like, I don’t know what this means. I’m like Googling. I’m like, why would someone cry about this? So I was getting so frustrated and it was going to take me out of the work. It was because I was so bogged down and people would want to have two hour long conversations to tell me about their feelings. And I’m like, I am not the one I truly wish I was, but I’m not. So then you have to find your person who’s the one who does

Melanie Meade:

The feeling.

And I think what I learned here in Curtis Bay is education is important and valuable, especially for our youth in Clariton right now in 2024, we do not have climate change or environmental justice spoken of, nor will they allow me to go in and volunteer to talk to the youth. Our newest superintendent, who is an African-American woman, would not allow us to prepare a lawyer clinic because there are three remaining class action lawsuits for the 2018 and 2019 Christmas fires. So our youth are disengaged. Our little league football team practices directly across the street from the industry. And the coaches say to me, who are sickly, this is not harming us. It hasn’t harmed us. We did it when we were little. And that is what must stop aligning with Hilary, aligning with Elise, Dr. Nikki and Curtis Bay gives me voices to now take back to those coaches to say, look, here it is a problem and let’s stop it.

Let’s unite. Let’s stop allowing them to divide. Because our youth in Clariton are winning football games for 40 years and dying at the age of 20, overdosing on Fentanyl or other drugs less than 30 years. And we don’t have the time. We’re 50 years behind in the conversation. So we need to pick it up. And I’m able to pick it up because I have Hills, tiktoks and Curtis Bay and you Max real-time news. So that if you don’t understand, take a moment to listen here, check in and let’s continue this work. We are not defeated because we are together. Give it up for our incredible panel.

While Democrats are looking for scapegoats to blame for their losses on election day, Donald Trump is busy making cabinet and administration appointments. When it comes to US policy on issues ranging from the climate crisis to Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, from public health policy to reproductive rights and labor rights and civil rights, from trade wars to mass deportations, one thing is clear: a lot is about to change. But between Trump’s own contradictory statements and a corporate, independent, and social media ecosystem overflowing with conjecture, misinformation, propaganda, and partisan hackery, it is difficult to know what exactly is coming, how we should be preparing for it, and how we can fight it.

So what are we facing, really? How do we get ready for the fight ahead? What tools do we need to parse fact from fiction in this critical moment, when talk is everywhere but truth is in short supply? What lessons from the last Trump administration can we use to effectively navigate the very different political terrain we’re on and media ecosystem we’re in today? In this livestream, we dug into these questions (and answered yours!) with independent media makers Abby Martin of Empire Files, Francesca Fiorentini of “The Bitchuation Room” podcast, and Kat Abughazaleh of Mother Jones.

Studio: David Hebden, Cameron Granadino, Adam Coley
Production: Maximillian Alvarez

Transcript

Maximillian Alvarez:  Donald Trump is headed back to the White House in two months, and with the news this week that the GOP has won a majority in the House of Representatives, the fully MAGAfied Republican Party will effectively control all three branches of government: the executive, the legislature, and the judiciary.

The election was just over a week ago, and since then, Democrats have been busy pointing fingers at each other and looking for scapegoats to blame for their losses. Meanwhile, Donald Trump is busy making cabinet appointments and administration appointments. Trump is already sending shockwaves with jaw dropping picks, tapping Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz for attorney general, for instance; Thomas Holman, an Obama-era appointee to ICE, who was one of the architects of Trump’s zero tolerance policy for border czar; Florida Senator and foreign policy hawk Marco Rubio has been tapped as secretary of state. And the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, and billionaire entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, are going to head up a new Department of Government Efficiency.

Listen, when it comes to US policy on issues ranging from climate change to Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, from public health and social security to reproductive rights and labor rights and civil rights, from trade wars and tax codes to mass deportations, one thing is clear: a lot is about to change.

But between Trump’s own babbling contradictory statements and a corporate, independent, and social media ecosystem that is just overflowing with conjecture, doomerism, misinformation, propaganda, and partisan hackery, it can be really difficult to know just what exactly is coming down the pike, how we should be preparing for it, and how we can fight it.

So what are we facing, really? How do we get ready for what’s coming? What tools do we need to parse fact from fiction in this critical moment when talk is everywhere but truth is in short supply? There’s a lot of sound and fury out there, and it’s only going to get louder and more confusing as we rumble onward into the dark unknown of the next four years.

And we need to get our heads and hearts right for the fight ahead. We need to have a clear-eyed understanding of the political terrain that we’re actually on and the media ecosystem that we’re operating in, both of which are decidedly different today compared to what they were in 2016 when Trump was first elected.

And that is exactly why I could not be more excited for today’s livestream, where we’re going to talk to three brilliant independent media makers who have so much to teach us about how to fight and win on that terrain. I’m truly honored to have joining us on the stream today the one and only Abby Martin, independent journalist, host of the Empire Files, a vital interview and documentary series which everyone should go watch. She’s the director of the 2019 documentary Gaza Fights for Freedom and the new documentary Earth’s Greatest Enemy.

We’ve got the one and only Francesca Fiorentini, correspondent, comedian, host of The Bitchuation Room podcast, the former host and head writer of the web series Newsbroke on AJ+, and host of the special Red, White and Who? on MSNBC.

And we’ve got the one and only Kat Abu, video creator and TikTok Powerhouse who started her media career at Media Matters for America monitoring dangerous narratives on Fox News, and who now produces video explainers for Mother Jones, Zeteo, and her personal accounts, which have gained tens of millions of views over multiple platforms.

Abby, Francesca, Kat, thank you so much for joining us on The Real News Network. I really appreciate it.

Kat Abu:  Thanks for having us.

Francesca Fiorentini:  Yeah, woo! There’s a lot of questions I don’t know if we can answer.

Kat Abu:  I think the three of us can solve everything. That sounds right.

Francesca Fiorentini:  Yeah, sure, sure. Give us some time.

Kat Abu:  An hour.

Maximillian Alvarez:  [Laughs] Listen, man, I got a lot of confidence in this brilliant group, so we’re not going to be able to figure everything out, but we’re going to be able to figure some shit out. And we have so much to learn from the three of you, and I’m so grateful to all of you for being on this stream with us together.

And I did want to just give a note to the audience real quick here at the top that we are going to have an audience Q&A section later in the hour. I can’t promise that we’ll be able to get to everyone, but if you’ve got questions for our guests, please put them in the live chat and we’ll get to as many of them as we can at the back end of the hour here.

So let’s get rolling. We got a lot to dig into here. Abby, I want to come to you first, but this question is going to be for everyone. So we’ll roll into Francesca and Kat after Abby. So I want to toss you guys this opening question here. Like I said in the intro, the past week has just been a dizzying avalanche of bad news amplified by a constant doom dump of panicked reactions to that news.

So I want to ask, how are you reacting to and processing all of this, and what’s your message to folks out there watching about the reality that we are actually facing with a second Trump administration? And are there specific cabinet appointments or policy changes or political battles that you are especially focused on right now?

Abby Martin:  Thanks so much for having me, Max. It’s great to be on this panel. I’m a little less shocked than I was in 2016, let’s say. I think I was resigned to the inevitability of a Trump presidency for about two years, ever since I found out Biden was sticking it in and not giving up his seat. I think we all got tricked for the last a hundred days when Kamala was anointed that we actually thought that it wasn’t maybe an inevitability, that Kamala did have a chance at winning. So ultimately, I’m just pissed off that the Democrats failed so abysmally and paved the road for this to happen, because it really does all fall on their shoulders.

But I think that when we take a step backward and look at the playing field and Democrats and Republicans and the ruling class here, Wall Street executives and a lot of billionaires and millionaires did resign to that ultimate Trump presidency far long ago, Max, and they already said, Larry Fink from BlackRock, the CEO already said nothing will fundamentally change because at the end of the day, it’s about capital accumulation whether or not you’re a Democrat or Republican. Yes, they may differ on religious zealotry and how much that has infiltrated politics, but ultimately they would much rather have a Trump, have someone who is fascist. Because we already know that, ultimately, it doesn’t matter for them. Their pocketbooks will still be lined and the capital will still be gained. They would ultimately much rather have Trump than someone like a Bernie Sanders.

Now, that’s not to discount the fears, the very real trepidation, obviously, from minorities, from trans people, from leftists. Trump ran on a very openly fascist platform where he said he was going to deport pro-Hamas sympathizers while there’s this upswell of pro-Palestine protests against the country. Obviously the environment is going to be completely gutted. Every last vestige of regulation and protection are going to be thrown out the window.

So it’s a very dystopian time that we’re entering into, the fact that Trump has been able to dial into this not only conservative hegemony when you’re looking at mainstream media, because even though the conservatives paint it as the liberal media dominates everything, we know the power, scope, and reach of conservative media, and then he folded in all of the alternative media as well. And so that was a very smart strategy for him. We’re in for a very tough road ahead.

And somehow the Democrats failed to such an extreme degree that they even gave Trump an opening to seize on again this populist rhetoric and anti-war rhetoric. So amidst the Gaza genocide subsidizing this on behalf of the Democrats, Trump was able to seize and capture a huge swath of the populists who are rejecting status quoism and antiestablishmentism somehow, even though we’ve already had this man as president for four years and he gave nothing but whatever the ruling class wanted. But here we are again, facing down a second Trump presidency, and it’s going to be a long fight ahead and long road ahead.

Two cabinet appointees that I’m especially concerned about, obviously secretary of state, Marco Rubio, little Marco couldn’t have been a worse pick. When you’re looking at foreign policy, especially Latin America, this guy’s a maniac warhawk who wants to just destroy Cuba and Venezuela, he wants to destroy Iran. All of these people are China hawks. So even though they might have good rhetoric time and again on somewhere like Ukraine, they all want the ultimate prize, which is war with China.

And then, goddamn, this guy Pete, Pete Hegseth — Sorry, his name is a doozy — Secretary of defense, this Fox News guy? I mean, this guy still supports the Iraq War in 2016. He’s still promoting the Iraq War and defending torture. So it’s a slew of the worst of the worst. Mike Huckabee, the list goes on. It’s just a nightmare.

Maximillian Alvarez:  You mean the guy with the white nationalist tattoos [laughs] who’s going to be secretary of defense? Yeah, not worried about that at all. Jesus fucking Christ.

All right, Francesca, let’s keep the good times rolling with you. How are you processing and responding to this moment? And are there specific appointments, policy changes, or political battles where your eyes are especially focused right now?

Francesca Fiorentini:  I just want to give it up to Abby. That was an amazing roundup, and she hit, somehow, all of the questions, and I super agree with it. And everything she said is just on the money. And especially the last part I just want to pick up on. The idea that Trump could endear himself to a very real cry for an end to the sending weapons to Israel and end to this genocide, giving some, complete window dressing: I’ll be the candidate of peace. Oh yes, I’m going to embrace this one Muslim American group in Michigan and all of that. And then turns around and appoints all these neocons who are, I mean, I think we’re going to be probably going to war with Iran, I think within a year, if not sooner. It’s incredible the amount of obvious misdirection switch around that he did.

But guess what? That’s all you had to do. All you had to do was speak to the very real pain and anger at the status quo, at the status quo of, again, genocide. And look, it’s not necessarily what got him the election, but it sure as hell captivated, captured a moment, and he took advantage of it. And so a certain part of the electorate did vote for Trump despite [that making] everything [becoming] worse in Gaza, if you ask me. And yes, there will be a wider war.

So I just want to name the Democrats’ unwillingness to even offer window dressing as to change. It is not that Kamala didn’t say the exact same thing that Biden did, but just a little bit of a hint. Here’s what I would do different. This is how we were going to change on that. That’s important to understand just how unwilling they were to even on a surface level try to appeal to what most people were saying, not just Democrats.

And then the other thing that Abby said, look, I wish I had her foresight, that two years ago I saw this coming [Martin laughs]. Because what’s happening to me, you know the scene in Memento where he starts to figure out that he’s lost his memory and he’s piecing it all together? That’s what I’m doing with the Biden administration, where you’re like, oh, shit. Not raising the minimum wage, we got fucked. Relying on the Senate parliamentarian, giving Joe Manchin everything he wanted, and he still tanked your Build Back Better Bill. All the ways. And then him running again. We should have seen this coming.

And even though, yes, it’s eight years since 2016, not a lot has changed, not a lot has changed. And our fight against MAGA and Trumpism and the Republicans writ large should not change. And so it is about, you hear, I’m sorry, but when I hear that they got a trifecta, it actually makes me laugh. It makes me smile. Because there’s a little bit of me that’s like, good for them, good for them. You know what I mean? They got a vision. It’s fascism. They took over every single court. They got what they wanted. Why? Because they had a plan.

So what’s the plan? That’s what we need. What is actually the plan for Democrats to win? And again, I’m in this moment, clearly I’m mad, and I don’t know if in four years there will be a plan that actually will gain, not just gain these voters back, but I think, more importantly, gain voters who didn’t go out to the polls or didn’t vote for either Kamala Harris or Donald Trump who feel disaffected, who are legitimately disenfranchised in various ways.

And so for me, look, there’s too much awfulness to stare directly at. It’s like, don’t look at it all like Trump did at the eclipse. You got to take your own corner, your own piece, and fight on that level, whether it’s locally, whether it’s in a community organization, whether it’s you getting involved in something, whether it’s a movie night, documentary month. Everyone, I love a good doc.

So I’m just like, however you can feel productive, generative, and helpful, and hopeful rather than trying to… If you take it all on, you’ll never get out of bed.

Maximillian Alvarez:  The notification fatigue is very real. This is one thing, hopefully, that we learned from the last Trump administration is that immobilizing people in constant fear with an endless barrage of bad news is part of the strategy by which we become demobilized and easier to defeat. And like Francesca said, you got to give it up to these fascists. They are, at least we can say, good planners. So there’s something to learn there.

Kat, I want to bring you in here. Same sort of questions. How are you processing this and what are you focusing on right now?

Kat Abu:  When he won, I thought I expected it, or I at least knew it was a possibility, but I really thought I’d wake up and be ready to go to Mexico. My mom straight up told me, she was like, I will help you move to Mexico. We’re from Texas. So we spend a lot of time down there. She was like, I will be there. I will help you move. I will take the cat.

And honestly, I woke up and I was just so energized, ridiculously energized [Fiorentini laughs], particularly because of what Francesca said: we need a plan. And I am someone who, as a job, I am immersed in right-wing media constantly, which means A, I know Trump’s entire cabinet right now. Pete Hegseth, oh my God, don’t even get me started.

But also I think it’s time you talked about people pointing fingers. When you’re pointing fingers to blame, to find someone to say, this wasn’t me, or it was your fault, that’s not productive. But what’s really productive is being able to say, fuck y’all who didn’t listen, who didn’t listen when I and 20 other people were sleeping outside of the DNC, when we tried to play ball just to get a Palestinian American on stage, when I had a super PAC reach out to me and ask me to run an entire pro-Palestine voter initiative over the last month of the election in Michigan and Wisconsin, and my only condition was speaking to Kamala Harris on camera for 10 minutes, talking to one Palestinian person, and instead she did a tour with Liz Cheney. So we know what went wrong.

And the way that we fix this is we get these people out. They don’t listen, and the only way they will is if we threaten their power. There were so many districts where Democrats didn’t even run a candidate. There were so many districts when the incumbent who had been there for 3, 5, 10 terms didn’t have anyone try to challenge them in the primary.

Because that’s the big issue with the Democratic Party, is that it fears dissent. And I think that’s healthy to have dissenters, dissenting supporters in your party. That means that there is freedom of speech. That means that you’re getting different ideas. That means if you are being corrupt, people will call you out.

And so what we need to do, like Francesca also said, on the local level, but also the state level, the national level is get people in communities to run for every possible office. And anyone who’s watching here and had that inkling in the back of your head and you were like, maybe I could do that. No, that’s insane. You can. Especially at the local and state level, you can absolutely do that. Even if you don’t win challenging that power will make them fucking sweat. They are terrified of losing power.

But as far as what’s going to happen for the next four years, we don’t know. I find a little bit of solace in the fact that there are so many incompetent buffoons being appointed that they will definitely wreck stuff. But it takes a little bit of competence, like a Dick Cheney type maniacal plotting, to be able to accomplish everything they want to do. And appointing both Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to one role for efficiency. Yeah, that’s not going to happen. They’re going to hate each other. And just these egos on the right, especially in these far up positions are just too big to balance with one another.

But things will get bad, and we don’t know… The best time to challenge authoritarianism is at the start and at the end of that regime. And we are at the start. It’s up to us, especially during the midterms, which are going to come up way faster than you think — Two years is not that long — To try to disrupt this while we can. Sorry, I’m so pissed off.

Maximillian Alvarez:  No, let the rage flow, baby. That’s why we got all three of you here. We need to channel that shit because if you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention. And I want to, in this second section, I really want to focus in on the work that y’all do in the media and what we can learn from that work.

But just a quick, rapid fire run around the table one more time. I want to pick up what Kat was putting down there. We should also emphasize that there are weaknesses, critical weaknesses in the MAGA movement, in the Trump administration, in the way Trump operates. And I wanted to ask if y’all had any of those at the top of your mind that you wanted to remind viewers of, things where all hope is not lost, all territory is not gone, the struggle needs to continue.

But I think Kat hit upon a really important one. What we do know from the first Trump administration is that it was a clown car of clowns coming in, clowns going out. People were in the administration for a week before they ran afoul of Trump and got the boot. I’m fully expecting Elon Musk to outwear his welcome with Trump in the next 10 minutes or something. Something may go wrong there with these two massive egos clashing against each other. So there are pressure points within the MAGA movement in Trump’s administration that we can put pressure on.

But I wanted to start with Abby and go back around, if there are other weaknesses or areas of struggle that you want to remind folks are still there. We can’t give up on everything here.

Abby Martin:  Well, it does seem to be, curiously, less of a vehicle for Christian Evangelicals, which, obviously, the first tenure was certainly that. Delivering the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the moving of the embassy to Jerusalem, that certainly was just giving the Christian Evangelicals exactly what they wanted.

This one is a little bit more, it seems, stage managed Trump is a total buffoon. He’s like Grandpa Simpson yelling at the clouds. I don’t know if anyone, I’m sure, Kat, you were watching very diligently the insanity that he was putting out there at some of his rallies. Even his victory speech seemed so lackluster. He didn’t even know what the hell to say. It was like, how is this your victories speech, aren’t you [crosstalk] —

Kat Abu:  We are going to get some really crazy reaction GIFs soon [laughs].

Abby Martin:  …He’s so horrible and he’s lost all of his mojo. He is not the same Trump that ran in 2016, but he is still a narcissist and megalomaniac, and that is to his detriment. So like you said, Max, the clashing of egos, the upset that’s certainly going to come with a lot of these appointments and a lot of things are going to come to a head. And he is belligerent. He’s a bull in a china shop, and that’s ultimately why the ruling class doesn’t want him, as opposed to someone who’s more manageable or someone who’s not as uncouth and belligerent to the rest of the world.

But yeah, I think it’s going to be a big opening to show how incoherent he is and how he doesn’t even have anything cogent to present at all. So there’s a lot of space to ram the truth through. It’s just a matter of how are we going to expose that when the entire media sphere is just locked down by right-wing billionaires?

Francesca Fiorentini:  And I’ll just pick up on that and say I think it’s a good question. I think things like subjecting ourselves to Piers Morgan panels, Abby is also [Martin laughs], for me, it’s fun sometimes, but I only do it if I can have a little bit of fun and sort of mock the entire thing. It’s ripe for mockery. I’m a comic, so I thrive on this kind of stuff.

That being said, I am so less interested in how we rake up the MAGA billionaires versus how we actually have the best defense, which is a good offense, and how we actually drive more fissure in the Democratic side and the liberal side, how we use this moment. A lot of liberals are being radicalized by this moment, and I think it is specifically the left’s job to allow liberals into our fold to let them be radicalized, help them learn, dig deeper, watch some Empire Files documentaries, watch some Newsbroke videos — Get woke, for lack of a better term.

Because there are also people, as much as we’re so hyperfocused on who voted for MAGA — Nah, man, I’m focused on the people who are disillusioned, and rightly so, with the Democratic Party as it exists, and they are trying to dig deeper, they’re trying to get involved. They realize this is not going to be won by them just getting a sticker and falling out of a coconut tree or whatever it is.

So there’s that. I agree that the Trump administration on its own will eat itself alive, but we have to remember that even ineffective fascism does still hurt people, and separate people, maim people, does give rise to vigilantism and hate crimes. We’re going to see a lot of that and we already have seen that. I think that child separation happened under Trump’s first term. I think we can expect that and worse.

So for me, here’s why I can’t care about the right and their billionaires: is because this whole year, this whole year, ever since Biden started campaigning, what have we been doing? Look at how silly they are. Look at how crazy they are. Look at how dumb, look at how weird, look at how corrupt, look at them drinking horse dewormer and shitting their pants on the regs. Look at all of this stuff. How undemocratic, how stupid.

None of it breaks through. None of it matters if you yourself are not offering real, concrete solutions. If you’re doing a piss poor job at selling any concrete solutions or a piss poor job at selling the solutions that you actually did do, some of the good things that Biden might’ve done, then I can’t help you. And so me pointing out Orange Man bad, I just brought this segment onto my show, it’s now going to just be an Orange Man Bad segment. We talk about all the Trump shit and then we talk about some real stuff. What are we doing? How can we fight back? What are people doing organizing with their unions and their workplaces? That, to me, is where our energy needs to be.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Preach, sis. Kat, you want to hop back in here?

Kat Abu:  Both of y’all are absolutely right. Abby hit on the head with talking about their oversized egos and Francesca talking about offering another solution. Besides, I think, George H.W. Bush, every president who has won since Carter has been a populist, whether on the right or left. And the good thing about progressive policies is if you don’t market them like a moron, pretty much every normal person likes them. People hate Obamacare, but they love the ACA. It’s the same thing.

And so I think when you’re bringing these people into the fold, that’s an important thing to remember. Instead of immediately attacking progressives or say, that’s a pipe dream, why don’t we try to strive to do better?

But I think the biggest thing that gives me comfort and I think to look out for in the next four years is what happened today: The Onion buying Infowars. They are losing their collective minds over this. And it’s because they desperately want to be a part of normal person culture [Fiorentini laughs], deeply entrenched culture.

I’ve watched it for the last three years, the Patriot Awards at Fox. It’s their equivalent of the Academy Awards. There are like four awards. One year it was Most Valuable Patriot, Patriot of the Year, Most Patriotic Badass — And that was Pete Hegseth, by the way — And the Back the Blue Award. That’s not a real awards show. No one watched that except me.

They want to have comics that are lauded and everyone thinks they’re hilarious, and instead you’ve got Gutfeld. And sure, there are a lot of radicalizing podcasts and stuff that are capturing the attention of especially young men, young white men. But as far as our identity of what’s cool, what’s fun, who you want to be around in real life and not online, they simply can’t capture that. They can only do it through a screen or through angry taglines they say on TV that your uncle might believe, but he’ll make sure not to say his true thoughts at Thanksgiving until a couple glasses of wine.

And that’s devastating. Then they’ll never get that. And I think exploiting that, on top of all of this other action we can take, on top of bringing people into the fold, on top of running candidates, on top of just resisting complete doom and despair, kind of rocks. They’re terrified of that and it makes them so mad that they can’t capture the lightning in a bottle of being a person.

Francesca Fiorentini:  Oh boy, that’s so true.

Maximillian Alvarez:  I think all three of you, beautifully and powerfully put, and important things to remember. And I could genuinely talk to you guys for hours and hours, but I know we have a limited time with you, and I want to make sure that in this next round we zero in on the work that you’re doing as media makers, as journalists, as analysts, as powerful voices in this ecosystem.

So let’s talk about the media side of things. And then to everyone watching, I want to remind you that we are going to have a Q&A section at the end of this hour where we want to hear your questions for our guests. So please, if you haven’t already, put your questions in the live chat.

So as we’ve already addressed here, corporate media, big tech, and this growing network of new media influencers have all played major roles in the rise of Trump and the MAGA movement, and they’re going to continue to shape our political reality as we head into a second Trump administration; From Elon Musk buying Twitter and turning it into a cesspit of Trumpaganda to influencers like Joe Rogan endorsing Trump the day before the election. The arena of digital media and online politics has shifted over the past eight years. As Francesca said, a lot has stayed the same, but changes have happened.

And Abby, you actually went on Rogan’s show again back in the summer, and I want to play that clip for our audience. Let’s roll that appearance from Abby’s on Joe Rogan.

Abby Martin:  A couple years ago. Yeah, back in 2021.

Maximillian Alvarez:  This is the 2021 one?

Abby Martin:  Yeah.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Let’s roll that.

[CLIP BEGINS]

Joe Rogan [recording]:  When you see the Iron ,and you’re seeing these rockets being fired out of Palestine and they’re all getting detonated in the air, and then you realize like, oh, this is kind of a crazy situation. One side has this insane technology and the other side is kind of in an open air prison camp, in a way. You can’t go anywhere. You’re kind of stuck.

Abby Martin [recording]:  25% of American Jews now, after the latest onslaught in Gaza, believe Israel’s an apartheid state. And that shows you how dramatically the narrative has completely flipped on its head. Because for the last 20 years, Israel’s been losing control of dictating the narrative. I mean, that was really what they relied on for so long: that we’re acting in self-defense, that we’re surrounded by people who hate us and hypothetically will commit genocide against us, to basically defend the fact that they are committing defacto genocide in Gaza. That is the erasure of Gaza residents. It’s the erasure of a culture. It’s not just the extermination. That’s according to the UN.

[CLIP ENDS]

Maximillian Alvarez:  The very fact that Abby fricking Martin was speaking the truth about the occupation and Israel’s genocidal war on Palestinians on the most popular podcast in the world is a testament to what you were saying in that very clip, Abby.

So what does that say about the media environment that we’re in today? And what have you learned navigating that environment that you think folks out there may not be seeing or understanding? And how do we square clips like that? The influence that shows like Rogan’s have their openness to voices like yours and also the Trump endorsement?

Abby Martin:  My God, there’s so many levels there. First we need to look at Joe Rogan’s audience, and I think it’s a huge mistake for liberals to write it off just like they have written off Trump supporters as racist, misogynists, and just a MAGA cult entirely.

Look, Joe Rogan’s audience is eclectic, diverse. I’ve had thousands of people come up to me over the course of the last eight or nine years, ever since I was going on his show, telling me that they learned about Palestine for the first time, that they became radicalized, that they became a communist based on what I said on his show. So I think it’s a huge mistake for, again, it’s just writing off any semblance of alternative spaces and turning them into conservative pockets.

And we saw exactly what happened with Bernie when he went on the Joe Rogan podcast and Joe Rogan endorsed him, and the entire liberal media sphere was up in arms. Everyone was like, recant the endorsement, denounce it. How dare you go on his show and how dare you take this endorsement from him? It was a huge mistake.

And I think that, when we’re looking at someone like Kamala Harris, it was a huge mistake for her not to go on Joe Rogan’s platform. Would Joe Rogan have ultimately endorsed Trump either way? I don’t know, probably. But I think, look, when we’re looking at these huge spaces with tens of millions of people who are captive audiences and we just silo ourselves off and we don’t engage with them, it’s to our own detriment.

You look at the liberal media, the corporate media of liberal spaces and liberal dominant narratives, they were painting that the economy was actually fine, the stock market was good. They don’t ever talk about poor, working-class people. They talk about the middle class, the middle class. So they’re erasing tens of millions of people. 40% of Americans are insecure economically.

So yeah, when you’re looking at what was a big driving factor of this election, people’s material conditions and being gaslit and lied to from so-called legacy media, or the term that conservatives have really hijacked to paint what they claim is corporate media hegemony on the liberal side. We know that that’s not the case, but it’s easy to paint it that way when the corporate media, by and large, is defending the status quo and promoting what we’ve been seeing: a genocide.

So it’s crazy and it feels schizophrenic, and I think people are completely detaching themselves from that space. We’re no longer in the position where we’re begging these outlets to cover our struggles fairly or to stop being so biased and one-sided when it comes to US foreign policy. We have to create our own avenues and engage with each other and uplift our voices to build this consensus that we know exists with a large swath of Americans.

Unfortunately, to the point of all of you and all of our work, it is so dominated by conservatives, and it’s so unfortunate because people are so detached from what they’re being told by the media pundits, and they’re basically being funneled into the alt-right pipeline because it’s so overly dominant. And now you see Elon Musk, who’s a total joke. I mean, he basically bought Twitter to just be relevant. Because the Babylon Bee, they want to be funny, they want to be culturally significant and relevant, and we’ve seen what he’s done with it. He bought it under the pretense that it would be somehow because the government was too involved, and he’s just become an arm, an appendage of the Trump administration.

So it’s getting quite scary. It’s getting quite scary. But look at two networks that allowed someone like me to have voices that were anticapitalist and antiempire: Telesur and Russia Today. And when you have a voice on networks like that, among the only spaces that we’re allowing people like me to talk, the national security state becomes involved and ends up suppressing voices like that. And it erases leftists like Chris Hedges and Lee Camp, and then silos us off into oblivion.

So we’re all scrambling and competing with our own brands and Patreons and podcasts to try to make a modicum of space that the right wing has engineered and really dialed in. And I think it’s an incredibly effective strategy, and you cannot understate or discount the effect that Joe Rogan had, the effect that folding in R.F.K. Jr. and Tulsi and all of these kind of alternative media figures into this umbrella. It’s a big tent, and they pulled everyone into it, and it’s the opposite of what the liberals have done to the left.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Man. Mic drop shit. So Francesca, I want to build on that and come to you, because you are quite the influencer yourself, and you’ve got a lot of experience, as Abby does, as Kat does, moving between the independent media sphere and the upper echelons of corporate or legacy media from MSNBC and Nat Geo to Fox. You’re like a bull shark. You can swim in saltwater and freshwater.

And perhaps most famously, I don’t know, maybe because he masochistically loves getting dunked on, Piers Morgan has frequently had you on as a guest on his show, Piers Morgan Uncensored. So let’s play the next clip of Francesca blasting Morgan on his show for being a hypocrite and a division profiteer.

[CLIP BEGINS]

Francesca Fiorentini [recording]:  During a Wednesday episode of Piers Morgan Uncensored, Piers Morgan found himself agreeing with a fellow guest named Kat Timpf, who had recently wrote a book about why we are so divided in this country, and why we need to come together, left and right, and really talk about the issues and not make everything so polarized.

And I, Francesca Fiorentini, happened to also be on that panel. And I took issue — Not with Kat Timpf or her book, which I actually thought was incredibly interesting and, yes, much needed because so many of the issues that face this country really do cut across party lines — But I took issue with Piers Morgan who was gushing over Kat and gushing over the book and saying that he agrees that we are way too divided as a nation, and we really need to just listen to each other, when this is a man whose bread and butter is made by people screaming at one another, arguing with each other, and he gets rich in the meantime. And here’s what I had to say about that. Take a look:

Piers Morgan [recording]:  I completely agree. I’m a bit like that. I don’t park myself into either the right or left camp. Go on.

Francesca Fiorentini [recording]:  You’re so dishonest, dude. You’re so dishonest, though. Because all you do on this show is play off social media algorithms to get people to fight. You lead with it in the cold open and you get the click, click, clicks. And if you don’t hit a mill, you never ask that person back. You literally play the game that Kat is decrying. But Piers, stop pretending like you think there’s something wrong and can’t we [crosstalk] reach across the aisle and hold hands —

Piers Morgan [recording]:  Francesca. There’s one central — There’s a flaw —

Francesca Fiorentini:  Your whole algorithm is based on it. Your whole model is based on it —

Piers Morgan [recording]:  Francesca, it’s a lovely statement that will get you lots of clicks from your followers, and that’s why you’ve just delivered your little monologue. However, it’s based on [crosstalk] —

Francesca Fiorentini:  I’m here on this panel for free —

Piers Morgan [recording]:  Wait a minute — You don’t normally get a million views for me, but I still invite you back. So that can’t be true. I do it as an act to charity, ’cause I like you.

Francesca Fiorentini:  I check the [stats]. You know I crush, you know I crush, Piers.

Piers Morgan [recording]:  I like having you on because you’re so annoying.

Francesca Fiorentini [recording]:  [Laughs] Same.

[CLIP ENDS]

Maximillian Alvarez:  Queen shit [laughs]. So Francesca —

Kat Abu:  We stan.

Maximillian Alvarez:  We stan [laughs]. So what has your experience in these different sides of the media ecosystem taught you about where the power is in that ecosystem? Who and what are we fighting against in this media arena, and how do we win? Or at least, how do we not lose in that arena?

Francesca Fiorentini:  We’re fighting liberals. We’re always fighting liberals. I’m sorry. The reason I do Piers is because it’s fun. But look at the commenters. They hate me. They think I’m crazy. They think I’m an insane person who supports trans rights, all that. I just go on there, again, as he called out, for fun, to show those clips to dunk on him and move on my merry way.

Sometimes I get real. Sometimes I talk about the billionaire class versus the rest of us, the number of venture capitalists that the Trump administration has supporting it: the David Sachs, the David Horowitz, all these people, the Peter Thiels and whatnot.

But for me, it’s about liberal mainstream media. And I think I want to pick up on some things that Abby said as well. I actually think that war and empire have a lot to do with why so many, especially young people, don’t have faith in mainstream news. And it’s because of the Iraq War, people like us who came up during the war on terror and completely that mainstream news was nowhere to be found. They were in lockstep with the generals and beating the drums of war. And we got a couple mea culpas here and there, but really nothing. And then since then, the media sphere has proliferated with alternative news, much of it amazing, a lot of it also disinformation. And then Donald Trump comes in and calls everything fake news and everyone’s discombobulated.

But the fact that the media, mainstream news, has still not been able to adequately discuss the war machine, the war profiteering, the military-industrial complex is just like, I mean, obviously in part because they accept money from these weapons contractors and, in some cases, are owned by them, but that will forever be the stain that they cannot wipe out and they’re clawing their way back from.

So for me, it’s twofold in terms of how to get the Rogans of the world, and how to get big. And I agree with Abby, you’ve got to find these openings. Look, I disagree with him platforming a lot of white nationalists and spewing a lot of misinformation about trans people. I have people who are talking to me like, I don’t know, but these kids are getting these sex changes, and you’re just like, I know you’re listening to Rogan all the time, man. That’s what’s happening.

However, who are the people who he will let on the show? And they happen to be, and usually always are, people who are antiestablishment. And that, I think, is the bigger — Rather than left/right, it’s antiestablishment, it’s distrust with big pharma, which can lead to awful things like the R.F.K. anti-vax movement, in my opinion.

But it can also lead to great things like the Medicare for All movement, or people who want pharmaceuticals, the drug prices to come down. It can lead to mealymouth things like Medicare gets to negotiate on insulin in two years, as per Joe Biden. So it’s like not capturing that antiestablishment… Not vibe, movement, is how the mainstream news loses every single time — To say nothing of the fact that for me, in my career… I had a special in 2019, right? MSNBC, they run it in the dead — You guys will love this — The last week of December. So it’s the week between Christmas and New Year. Nobody home, nobody watching. All the B hosts were in then. It was very funny.

And what happened in 2020? The pandemic, and Donald, and the election. Cable news did not need deep dive journalism, an hour-long report looking into the successes and failures of Obamacare. And that’s on them. And every four years they come around going, why is the electorate so misinformed? It’s ’cause you cannot break your own 24-hour news media cycle and actually give a journalist, a real journalist, an hour, give them an hour a week to explain something to the many, many millions of people that watch your program. But they can’t do that because they don’t need to. And again, it could be unsafe for their bottom line, to say nothing of it would have to be a little bit of an investment.

But anyway, one day I’ll be Stanley Tucci traveling Italy and eating my ass off. But until then, Bitchuation Room is where I’ll be.

Maximillian Alvarez:  We have the same dream, I just want to be the Mexican version of it [both laugh].

So Kat, I want to bring you back in here because you are doing something that so many of us want to figure out how to do but can’t. And you’re playing a really critical role in the short-form video space on platforms like YouTube, TikTok, X, and more. And you’re also doing something that none of us would ever want to subject ourselves or our worst enemies to: you are watching, studying, and analyzing ungodly amounts of Fox News.

So let’s play the next clip from one of Kat’s recent explainer videos:

[CLIP BEGINS]

Kat Abu [recording]:  And finally, Fox News is definitely excited about running the country again through Trump’s TV habits — In fact, they’re already proposing administration officials.

Speaker 1 [recording]:  I expect him to appoint someone really strong at the FCC, like Hannity.

Speaker 2 [recording]:  RFK is going to make us healthy again.

Tom Homan [recording]:  President Trump knows if he needs help securing that border, I’m standing by. If he needs help running a deportation operation, I’m standing by. But no formal offer has been made.

Kat Abu [recording]:  Oh, by the way, that last guy, who is a Fox News contributor and Project 2025 author has already been named as Trump’s border czar. Cool stuff.

Tom Homan [recording]:  I’m standing by.

Kat Abu [recording]:  These people feel like they’re invincible. And with Trump at the helm, they kind of are. But there is one advantage to Fox News: it’s public, which means we know it’s being pumped into Trump’s brain every morning, afternoon, and night. And a tipped hand like that is exactly how we can document and call out these authoritarian goals for you — Which Mother Jones has been doing well before this and will continue to do so well after.

[CLIP ENDS]

Kat Abu:  Damn, you cut off my cat. You didn’t show everyone the clip of my cat high off her ass.

Maximillian Alvarez:  I wanted to save something so that folks — I was going to say, go watch the rest of that video for a special treat at the end. But spoiler alert: it is Kat’s cat. And it is adorable.

Kat Abu:  She’s so cute. She’s wearing a little watermelon hat.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Oh my God, I love it. So I want to ask, Kat, if you could expand on, first, the points that you were making in that video. As an expert in this area, how do you see right-wing media, Fox News, especially shaping the politics of Trump, his base, and the GOP today, and what does that mean for our fight? And then I also, if I can, I want to ask if you could talk a little bit about your process for how you’re navigating this media environment and what your process is for making and using media to combat the corrupting influence of right-wing media.

Kat Abu:  I’ve talked about this before, but I think the interesting thing about Fox News, and my old boss at Media Matters, Andrew Lawrence, also, we just say this on repeat, is Roger Ailes created Fox News to support the GOP, but now the GOP exists to support Fox News. And this was really obvious during the Trump administration and when Tucker was on. That’s honestly, personally, the point that I am most annoyed with, just from a petty perspective, is now Fox hosts are like, oh, we have more power again I want them to have a bad day every day.

But now, GOP senators and congressmen, when Tucker was on, they used to compete with each other for a five-minute slot where they would only get to speak about a minute of the time. And now it’s that again. Trump has a place to call in every morning and rant for 10, 20, 30 minutes at a time. Hannity, his favorite fanboy, is out there with a direct line to the president. When Trump lost in 2020, Hannity literally was tearing up on air at the thought that he wouldn’t be able to call the White House day or night.

And as far as right-wing media as a whole, I think the big thing is there are all these forms of alternative media. Fox, they love to talk about mainstream media; You’re the most popular cable news channel in the country. You are the mainstream media. But that’s not how they see it. But it’s the biggest establishment version of conservative media.

So even though a lot of its viewers, it gets a ton of viewers, but that’s because most of them are super old and they’re just sitting in a chair getting scared all day every day, watching from Fox & Friends till Gutfeld. And they’ll die off soon enough.

But the influence isn’t really who is watching at that point. It’s twofold: One, it shows what far right narratives are finally OK to say in the mainstream. Tucker used to do this. He was the one that would normalize them. Like the great replacement theory. The first time he said that on Fox, it was in 2021. And me and my colleagues at Media Matters are watching it, and it was like red alert, all hands on deck. He said replacement, this is insane. But now you can hear it all the time, not just in Fox, but in the GOP.

And then additionally, it’s a place for the GOP to rally around. Once again, they are supporting Fox, not vice versa. Fox is dictating their policy. And if you want to know what’s happening or what’s going to happen in the next day, week, month, year of the Trump administration, watch Fox. Watch what Jesse Watters is saying, watch what Sean Hannity is saying, watch what Laura Ingraham is saying, and then the next morning, see what’s being repeated on Fox & Friends.

Or you don’t have to do that. You can just watch my stuff because I do it for you [Alvarez chuckles].

Maximillian Alvarez:  Thank you for your service [chuckles].

Kat Abu:  Of course, of course. I mean, I do miss getting paid a full-ass salary with benefits for it, but [crosstalk]. I don’t know anymore. I’m just hoping I don’t get hit by a car. That’s a good plan.

Francesca Fiorentini:  God.

Kat Abu:  Too real.

Francesca Fiorentini:  But Kat, I want to pick up something that you said, which is they’re the most mainstream-ass outlet, but then they say that they’re…

Kat Abu:  They’re hitting on the antiestablishment thing.

Francesca Fiorentini:  They’re hitting on the antiestablishment thing. Exactly. It’s like the brand is good for antiestablishment, but you never hear MSNBC, to their own discredit, they could easily be like, you’re not going to hear this anywhere else, but we’re telling you. You don’t even hear a whiff of that when, actually, sometimes — Not all the time — Sometimes they do [crosstalk] good reporting. I like [inaudible] show.

Kat Abu:  …It was like pulling teeth getting people to tell Biden to step down. The shit I have gotten since Oct. 7, 2023, I have gotten so much more anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab racism than I did growing up as a kid in Texas. But the shit that Democrats were saying to me, or supposed liberals were saying to me when I just said,hey, Joe Biden didn’t allow a primary, and this debate performance is clear that he should step down, some of the most vile shit I have ever had in my DMs and replies — And I monitor Nazis for a living.

Abby Martin:  Well, it’s so emblematic when you look at something like Bill Clinton. The fact that they had to hoist up Bill Clinton, who was flying the Lolita Express more than Trump, and instead of putting front and center, Trump was friends with the most notorious pedophile in the country. Holy shit. Isn’t that crazy? They didn’t say one thing because they thought Bill Clinton was too important of an asset to go talk down to Palestinians in Michigan. Yu can’t even unpack, say the brain damage going on [crosstalk] —

Kat Abu:  …A lot of people under 22 don’t know who Bill — They would not recognize him on the street [crosstalk]. Honestly, with the way that he looks now, I probably wouldn’t either. He literally looks like the “Suds” episode of SpongeBob. But as far as [Alvarez laughs] —

Francesca Fiorentini:  He looks like an Eli Valley cartoon. You guys know who he is? Oh my God. He literally looks like he’s turning into an Eli Valley cartoon.

Kat Abu:  It’s so bad.

Francesca Fiorentini:  [Crosstalk]

Kat Abu:  [Crosstalk]

Maximillian Alvarez:  It’s like a literal visual metaphor of the decaying [crosstalk] Democratic Party. It’s like, hey, let’s bust out a decrepit slick Willie and send him to Michigan, that’ll win voters over. He, Biden, Pelosi, all these people are falling apart, as is their ideology. They just won’t let their fingers off the wheel of power until someone like Trump and the Republicans take it from them.

Kat Abu:  No, and that was so clear at the DNC. I was one of the 200 creators that was at the DNC, and they were super accommodating at first. They were like, let us know who you want to talk to. And I had a very detailed proposal of all the surrogates I’d want to talk to, and I was like, I think I’m the only Palestinian creator here with the way that I look. It’s shitty that wearing a hijab and having dark hair and dark eyes, even though this is obviously fake, makes people listen to you less. But I was like, if you want a Palestinian to talk to that’ll make some dude in Iowa not shoot up a Walmart, I’m here. I am here. After a day of delusion on my part, I was like, oh, it’s clear I am here as a token.

But also, so was everyone else. They brought in all of these creators, and there were some that were like, oh, yay, democracy, going to the Hotties for Harris party and sitting on the J.D. Vance couch or whatever. But a lot of people there are great people who do great work and were just trying to do their jobs. And then when the Democrats were like, you need to do this, this, and this, they were like, no. And the Democrats were like, wait, what? Even though they marketed this whole thing as the creator convention, as the creator election, and it’s because they fundamentally misunderstand what that is and what actually appeals, especially to young people. It’s icky.

Francesca Fiorentini:  Did you get kicked out?

Abby Martin:  …[Crosstalk] crisis?

Kat Abu:  No, I didn’t get kicked out, but I spent the night outside with the Uncommitted movement, and you had to go to get your credentials. And I was like, well, I can’t do the credentials. You don’t get them after 11:00 AM. And I was like, well, I can’t really leave. And the only good decision they made was not siccing the cops on us or escorting people out for not having their credentials the second day because you had to get them every single day.

But no, I did not get kicked out. I know Hassan was escorted out. I think that that would’ve been too dicey. They’re like, oh, well, we don’t want to… You guys can stay out here, but we don’t want to put you in cuffs or escort [crosstalk] —

Francesca Fiorentini:  Plus, the headline of “Palestinian Content Creator Gets Kicked Out” is not one they want necessarily. Sorry, I interrupted. But…

Kat Abu:  No, no, no, that’s exactly, that’s what I was trying to say.

Maximillian Alvarez:  And there was some eyebrow raising shenanigans, to say the least, at the DNC. That was actually where I first met Kat in person, was at the Uncommitted sit-in. I’m there with my camera, I turned, I’m like, oh, that’s Kat Abu. So I’m there. And then when I tried to go back in, suddenly the entrance to the United Center is blocked off for the next hour. So —

Kat Abu:  Oh, yeah, they blocked off the front entrance, right? So no one could go out that way.

Maximillian Alvarez:  So when the Uncommitted sit-ins started, a lot of folks went out. And then, curiously, we found that same entrance — Which had been open the whole day — Was suddenly, you can’t go through here anymore. So it felt like a trap. Anyone who’s going to go out and look at the Uncommitted thing, go stay out there. You’re not getting back in, but

Francesca Fiorentini:  I see. Right. Right, right, right. Yeah.

Kat Abu:  And also, sorry, this is sort of unrelated. I’d just like to say I went to go see Charlie XCX at the United Center a month, two months ago. There is weird United Center trauma, and Max, if you go back, you’re going to heal it too.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Oh, Jesus [laughs]. Yeah. Whenever I go back, it’ll be too soon, that’s for sure.

Francesca Fiorentini:  Because I thought this was also the biggest latest breaking story before the election was the Epstein stuff and the Michael Wolff tapes revealing that Epstein was his source, and actually Epstein had regular contact with Donald Trump during his first term before he was obviously raided by the FBI and arrested and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera — Trump’s FBI.

But Abby’s so right on that this would’ve been the story that, across the board, many people are interested in terms of, yes, the biggest sex trafficker, not only that, but also like a billionaire and everything, and all the connections that he had. And so you can imagine this alternate universe, which might not have affected anything, but where Kamala Harris goes to the Joe Rogan podcast, sits down [Martin laughs], and gets to talk about these Epstein tapes and all this information, and they get to smoke a bowl and think about, did Donald Trump have Epstein killed? You know what I’m saying?

Abby Martin:  Imagine. Instead, you have Don Jr. talking about who’s on the P. Diddy tapes. It’s like, dude, what about your fucking dad, bro?

Francesca Fiorentini:  Right, exactly. Exactly.

Abby Martin:  It is so fun to envision an alternate reality that would be so cool. Imagine what would’ve happened.

Kat Abu:  The Democrats are so good at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

Abby Martin:  Exactly.

Kat Abu:  Just, oh my God.

Abby Martin:  It’s so obvious. Capitalism’s in crisis and we’re seeing this [crosstalk] —

Kat Abu:  If you have to throw Bill Clinton under the bus, do it.

Abby Martin:  …Across the planet, not just in the US, and people are voting out incumbents as a rejection of whatever their material conditions are. And I absolutely, even though a lot of people are downplaying the Gaza genocide and the Ukraine War as factors in this election, I do not think that you can uncouple the economic conditions and hardships of Americans with the periphery and backdrop of funneling tens of billions of dollars to our foreign policy to subsidize a genocide. I don’t think that that can be uncoupled for the average person to say, hey, that doesn’t make sense. Why can’t I pay for bread or eggs at the grocery store but we have unlimited money to kill babies?

So I think that it’s a huge problem. And when you have the Democratic Party saying nothing will fundamentally change while the writing is on the wall. Any of us could have predicted what was coming if we just laid it bare. And they did not care enough to stop it.

Maximillian Alvarez:  I think that’s a really powerful point. To cap off the hour here, I want to A, not take liberties with anyone’s time and say that we did ask if you guys could be on until 5:00. If you do need to go, totally understand. It’s been an absolute honor having this conversation with the three of you, I hope we can have you back.

For those of you who can stay, I wanted to just see if we could do a little overtime here to get to some of the audience questions. Y’all have touched on some of them already, but I wanted to throw up one here about the merit to the argument that the Democrats can be pushed left. It really comes down to what path forward is there in the existing Democratic Party? We know that that is not the end all be all of the political struggle, but insofar as the Democratic Party is part of that struggle, what would you say to folks about how we should be approaching that strategically, and how far we can actually push this party that seems hell bent on going to the right, to the left?

Abby Martin:  I want to touch upon that just because I do have to go. I think Kamala’s whole performance and Biden’s whole performance… We can’t forget that Biden won on a progressive platform. Everyone was coat tailing the Bernie Sanders movement because of how enormously popular his brand of progressive populous politics were. And so Biden, over the course of his presidency, unfortunately, abandoned a lot of that. And then Kamala Harris, nothing will fundamentally change, ran one of the most conservative platforms, abandoned Medicare for all, ban on fracking, federal jobs guarantee. All of those things just made no sense. Why would anyone who’s remotely leaning conservative vote for Diet Coke when you can vote for the real thing?

I think at this point, look, I was really energized about Bernie just because of the tens of millions of people that were in the streets mobilizing because I felt it was a revolutionary moment to catalyze the masses. I never believed in electoral politics on a federal level, especially, I’m not saying to discount city council races and local districts, obviously referendums and city council and all those things, absolutely we need to be investing our energy into seizing power locally. However, investing in two to four years and putting all of your political energy and enthusiasm into federal electoral politics, I think, is a dead end. And I think if that’s not apparent now, it sure as hell should be.

Let this election galvanize and radicalize us outside of electoralism because the Democrats have perfectly elucidated that they will not lean left. They would rather have fascism than Bernie Sanders populism. That’s just social democracy. They would rather have Trump than an FDR platform. So they are going so far right because they have no other choice. They have to maintain their capital and power no matter what’s at stake and what’s in the future.

So it’s up to us, the tens of millions of people who have been radicalized by the Gaza genocide, who radicalized by Bernie Sanders, who see the climate change catastrophe on the horizon. It is up to us to build the movement we know is the only thing that has ever pushed politics left, the social movements in the street, the masses that shut down business as usual.

That is the only possibility that we have moving forward because time is urgent. We don’t have the time to wait for a supermajority pie in the sky — Oh, maybe, and if one of these freaks on the Supreme Court croaks — No, we don’t have time to wait and waste. The time is now. We need to act accordingly and get involved locally with the struggle and with activism because that’s how we’re going to move mountains.

Kat Abu:  Hell yeah.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Hell yeah, sister. Well, I know Abby said she has to go. I just wanted to, first, have a Jesus moment, ’cause that was incredible and fire. And also really, really stress to everyone watching you need to subscribe to the Empire Files YouTube channel, you need to support Abby’s work, her current documentary, her past documentaries, share them with everybody you know, watch everything that she does. You can see for yourself why her voice is so vital.

Abby, thank you so, so much for joining us today. It’s been a real honor.

Abby Martin:  You guys rock. It was such an honor. I hope to do this way more frequently. We should do this like a monthly thing or something.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Let’s do it!

Kat Abu:  So good to meet you.

Abby Martin:  All girls panel, baby.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Hell yeah. Solidarity, sis.

Abby Martin:  Bye guys.

Kat Abu:  Bye.

Francesca Fiorentini:  Bye Abby.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Francesca and Kat, if you guys got more, I would hate to follow that act too [crosstalk] —

Kat Abu:  I don’t know what I can add to that.

Maximillian Alvarez:  — But I guess if you have anything else to say…

Francesca Fiorentini:  I forgot what the question was, but…

Kat Abu:  Yeah, I was entranced.

Francesca Fiorentini:  I really appreciate Abby’s perspective and her analysis is spot on and always has been. I am not ready to say that electoralism is not going to work. I think that we cannot just take our ball and go home because it didn’t go the way we wanted. I think we have to be players in this, and I don’t think that being players means you’re not in the streets. And I don’t think being players means it is the only way.

And I think I’m very much let a hundred flowers bloom, I guess, in a Maoist sense? I don’t know. In a nonviolent Maoist sense. But I do think that we need inside-outside strategies. I am not someone who you’re going to hear bashing the squad for not doing enough. I think that there are many, many hurdles and layers to actually getting things over the finish line in Congress. I think a lot of us have sometimes maybe too simplistic of a view simply because we feel like we elected somebody, they didn’t do the change we wanted, so we’re fed up.

But I do think that even though Biden’s — I mean good God, I’m sure he would like a mulligan on the last year and a half of his presidency. But I do think what Abby said about Joe Biden’s election in and of itself was thanks to the progressive movement, so was Barack Obama’s thanks to a progressive anti-war movement, that he absolutely capitalized on. Eight years of the war on terror made people sick and tired of it. We elected Barack Hussein Obama, the first Black president.

Are you kidding me? I was under no illusion that he would be really for the working class or actually very progressive, but it was such a radical sea change that I do think we have to be poised for what is the electorate willing to do when it comes to reacting to what we know will be a failed fascistic government coming from Donald Trump. So the pendulum swings, but let’s swing it farther, and let’s make sure it stays there, and let’s break this goddamn grandfather clock of a duopoly.

So I am inside outside. I’m of both minds. I just feel like you find the place and the space that you feel most effective, and we stop putting so much credence into the electoral process, meaning especially on a national level. I just feel like by the time you get to the presidential election, it really is which flavor of warmonger. And yes, I really would like the diet warmonger, honestly, because I feel like Kamala Harris and the Democrats were much more pushable. And I know people disagree with me on that, but I think we see that… Look at the Zionists. Trump’s disappointing a bunch of bidens. It’s like they’re nothing but Bidens. And Biden was arguably one of the more Zionist people in his cabinet.

So anyway, that’s where I stand on that. I feel like we on the left tend to say, here’s my line, this is what I believe, and if you don’t believe this, then you can go sit over there. So let’s have the same grace and understanding that sometimes we’re like, gee, how did Trump get all these voters? Let’s be kind to one another as well as we forge a path forward and figure out what to do.

Kat Abu:  Can I just jump in here real quick?

Maximillian Alvarez:  Please.

Kat Abu:  One of the things that I want to stress to everyone in the world all the time, and not just even in the political sense, is, in general, there are very few consequences for your actions that will genuinely affect you. Whether it’s standing up for a server who someone is yelling at, whether it’s doing that thing that you always wanted to do, or whether it’s running for office, speaking up at your town hall meeting at your local city council meeting, whether it’s trying to mount change in any way. If you feel any inkling to do it, you should do it.

I think that we’ve, coming back to the antiestablishment stuff, we’ve come to this idea that you have to have all of these ins to get anywhere, and that these people in power have some type of extra read, some secret read on the electorate that we don’t have, or some secret it factor that the rest of us don’t have, but they are just people. They are just as fallible and dumb and weak as all of us, maybe more so.

Francesca Fiorentini:  More so!

Kat Abu:  More so. And anyone that gets into power will probably take on a little bit of that too. And that includes you, me, all of us. That’s just the human condition.

But if enough of us actually acted on what we want to do, especially in an age where you can reach so many more people through alternative media, through the TikTok algorithm, through person-to-person connection that a lot of people are really missing. I’m hosting a women’s club at my apartment this weekend because I read it in a book and I was like, you know what? Why don’t I just do that? Maybe in a different time I would’ve been like, well, probably no one would be interested or whatever. But instead I reached out to some friends and they were like, yes, that sounds like so much fun. So everyone’s bringing a friend. We’re learning how to embroider together.

And it’s just action. Action is what spurs us forward. And it doesn’t have to be running for office. It doesn’t have to be taking to the streets. This is going to be a really weird four years, at the very least, and probably pretty dark. And if you don’t act on what you know is right and what you want yourself or others to do, nothing is going to get done.

Francesca Fiorentini:  Max, this is the least I’ve ever heard you speak, maybe ever [Alvarez laughs].

Kat Abu:  I’d also like to apologize for any, I’m actually going to DM Abby after this. My wifi is laggy. I’m on my building wifi, so if I interrupt, I’m so sorry.

Maximillian Alvarez:  You’re great.

Kat Abu:  No, you’re fine.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Y’all have been incredible. I’m sitting here in awe. I’m learning, man. I could spout a lot myself, but y’all have so much insight that we need to hear, and I don’t have all the damn answers. I need to learn from y’all, just like I hope our audience is learning.

And in a way, y’all were already picking up on another audience question that I want to just keep this ball rolling. One of the questions was about how we fight the hate, the vitriol, the trolling, the misinformation on social media that is emboldening people in the MAGA movement. And so I wanted to pose that to y’all as well.

But I wanted to pick up on where Kat was talking just now that the answer to that question does not solely exist on your online tactics for engaging people through a screen. I can’t stress enough how important the old meme of go touch grass, go talk to your neighbors. It really matters.

One of the things that I’ve noticed watching my own grandfather die from Alzheimer’s over eight years since Trump was first elected to now, his social world, his physical mobility, everything in his world has shrunk. And that got hyperaccelerated with COVID, where his social world went to going out to the golf course, meeting friends, to those friends dying, to his mobility being limited, to now being locked to one living room, and the entire connection to the outside world is mediated through the TV in his living room that plays two channels: Fox and OAN.

And so I bring that up because I know this man, I love this man. He is one of the many Trump supporters in my family who I know is not the diehard racist and fascist that we like to paint Trump supporters as being. But what I really want to emphasize for people that they can learn from folks like my grandfather and folks in your family is that people don’t just go gung-ho into fascist politics saying like, yeah, let’s deport all the Brown people. That comes way later because people’s politics flow downstream from their perception of the reality they believe they’re living in.

When you are being bombarded with these images of what the world looks like outside your window as your connection, your real connection to that world gets smaller and smaller and is all mediated through screens. That’s how you end up with so many Fox News viewers saying, you live in Baltimore. Do you even walk down the street? I won’t ever go to New York City or to Chicago, these places are bedlam. It’s like, that’s nuts. But that’s the reality they believe they’re living in, and Trump’s fascist politics feels like a natural response to this dark world that’s being presented to them.

And so, going out and countering that misinformation with reality, with real human connection seems to me to be one of the most, if not the most potent antidote to that fearmongering.

Francesca Fiorentini:  And the same thing with the media in terms of why do we only sit in diners when it’s an election? You should sit in diners all the time. You should really talk to people all the time. The mainstream news has allowed for the demonization of immigrants, as much as they want to clutch their pearls over Donald Trump’s wall or mass deportations. We all watched in 2016 how Donald Trump single-handedly moved the Overton window and Jake Tapper helped him refix over to the right a little bit.

Jake Tapper, the whole GOP primary was just, what do you think of Donald Trump’s wall? What do you think of Donald Trump’s wall? What about the wall? How about the wall? It’s like, no, no, no. How about a serious answer to the question of immigration in this country? How about a serious plan? What do you think about the wall? They helped every single step of the way, and they’re going to continue to help when it comes to mass deportations.

How many Haitian migrants have they actually platformed on mainstream news? How many times have they talked to, have they gone to, let’s say, Portland and seen the way that decriminalization programs are working in the community? We always make fun of when Jesse Watters or some Fox News hosts will go and be like, isn’t it crazy here?

And it’s funny, but who do you actually see doing it from the other side, or doing it from a side that doesn’t have an agenda? Just being real with it. It’s like you got to listen. It’s like long-form investigative stuff, Reveal, Real News Network. Even some Bourdain did that. People are like, wow, Bourdain is really amazing, how he talks to people. So that’s the other thing is how are we humanizing all of these groups, including ourselves, every single day? And there’s just a consensus to not do that because fear really does sell.

And so I think I’m more terrified to see what nonprofits, what different organizing, not left, but liberal entities, which news outlets, who’s going to decide I don’t want to resist anymore, I’m just going to join. It’s too much for me to resist this fascism. Let’s just join them because that’s easier, I need access, and I need money. That terrifies me.

Kat Abu:  It is really scary. I have to hop off after this, but I think two things on that is one of the big problems at these big companies, like at MSNBC and CNN and The New York Times, and all these big media companies is they have a lot of really good reporters who the leadership straight up will silence their work. It will be written, it will be edited, it will be ready to publish, and then it will just be on the chopping block and no reason will be given. And then, oftentimes, they’re assigned to a different beat. That is such a problem in our media right now.

I grew up conservative in Texas, and I think a lot of people underestimate the power of conservative propaganda. You were talking about how people see cities. I have lived full-time in New York, DC, and Chicago over the last two years because I had two major life changes. So I had to move from DC to New York, New York to DC, DC to Chicago. Haven’t been stabbed once in any of them.

But the way that conservatism was portrayed to me — And granted, my parents were more like Reagan conservatives, but still, there was so much misinformation that I had to break. Like, we’re the responsible party. We are being responsible. If you think our cities, even though you haven’t stepped foot in one in 15 years, are being taken over by maniacs, you’re like, well, I’m being the responsible one because, for some reason, my brain is now rewired to make me think that certain people love crime, like that’s a position that anyone has.

But it’s a lot harder, especially older people, to get someone to admit that they’re wrong. No one likes doing that. And I know when I had to realize when I was 16 and we moved to Tucson, for whatever reason, I moved to Tucson halfway through high school. Dallas is where I grew up, was super segregated by income and by race. I had never really been around a poor person before. So many of my friends, Tucson is a very low income city, and so many of my friends at my school couldn’t afford basic things. I had never really experienced that before, someone on a daily basis, someone who I had a real relationship with, and it totally radicalized me. But I had to go through and see all of these things that I thought were truth were wrong.

And that feels like shit. You feel like a moron. You’re like, what is my moral compass? It’s not fun. And I look at people like my mom, my grandmother, her mother was a major GOP operative in Texas, so she was right in the middle of it. She grew up with this as a major part of it. And she has re-evaluated so many of her views, and I think it takes a lot of bravery and grit. It’s hard to do that. And if you’re looking back when you’re like 40, 50, 60, and you’re like, did I spend this much of my life being wrong, lacking empathy where I could have given it, villainizing people who didn’t deserve it? And so that’s, it’s —

Francesca Fiorentini:  Never too late, though.

Kat Abu:  It’s never too late.

Francesca Fiorentini:  It’s amazing to hear when older people might make this transition. It’s like, yay.

Kat Abu:  It is. But I think that there’s a lot of people on the left who either grew up in a family that wasn’t really political, or was liberal, like Obama voters or whatever, and they really underestimate, A, the power of propaganda that gets you there in the first place, and then also how hard it is to change that because you’re trying to break an entire structure of thinking and also have someone admit, I was wrong, everyone I love was wrong, and I might’ve had some really shitty opinions about ideas, people, places, things, other nouns, and it’s…

Francesca Fiorentini:  And calling people racist is, and calling folks racist or sexist, it isn’t a winning strategy. Even if some of them are.

Kat Abu:  If you say something or sexist to me, I will say that. But if it’s just like a guy [crosstalk] —

Francesca Fiorentini:  It’s being able, it’s the looking past the racism and sexism. I said this four years ago before the election then: you cannot shame Trump voters. You cannot shame Trump. You cannot shame the Trump administration. Shame doesn’t work. It’s for us. Us making fun of them is for us. Now, we need it to stay sane because we have to tap in and be like, is this real? Are you real? And I think we’re all doing that, and this is The Real News Network. So there you go. But that’s for us. It’s not necessarily going to move the broad electorate. That’s just for us to be like, that was fucking crazy, right? Yeah, that was fucking crazy. OK, we can laugh at that. Yeah. Yeah, we can fucking laugh at that. Yeah. That’s for us.

Kat Abu:  I tell people all the time, say, question me. If you watch my stuff and you’re like, that doesn’t sound right, question me. I am fallible. Everyone is. I could be wrong. Or just make sure you have an extra source or two on that. This is not the time to think anyone is perfect, that anyone can say anything and it’s the absolute truth. And when it comes to conservatives and on the right… Where was my train of thought going on this, I had a point that I was really fired up about [crosstalk].

Maximillian Alvarez:  If it comes back to you, I will just say that one of the reasons that I’ve always gravitated towards your work, Kat, is that I myself, as folks on The Real News know, I grew up deeply conservative as well in Southern California. And for me, the reality breaking thing that got me to start that long process of unlearning all the dumb shit that I believed and acted on was the recession, was this massive market crash. Our family lost everything. 12 years ago, I was working in warehouses and factories wondering why the hell I believed in this system that just bailed out all the banks while families like mine lost everything. And I was working with ex-cons, undocumented folks, trying to make my own paycheck so I could buy dinner that week. So that forces you to confront a lot of those realities.

But as you both said, so well, and as you both and Abby embody so well, we need grit and grace to navigate that and to help others navigate it. And it can be done. We’re living proof of it. But we can testify as people who have made that transition that, like Francesca said, shaming and berating, even though it may feel morally righteous and good, is not going to fucking work, if your goal is to bring folks out of that darkness into the light, finding their way back to love and common humanity and working class struggle. You need grit and grace.

Kat Abu:  My point came back to me, and it’s exactly what you’re saying. I clown on conservatives all the time because it’s fun, but I try to only punch up; people on Fox who are getting millions of dollars to misinform you. And even when I talk, I did a video about Rob Schneider’s comedy special, which was abysmal from a comedic perspective.

Francesca Fiorentini:  I gotta see this.

Kat Abu:  It was a lot of fun.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Wait, Francesca, can you please have Kat on your show to talk about that [laughs]?

Francesca Fiorentini:  Please.

Kat Abu:  That? Oh, yeah, yeah. We need to break it down [inaudible] please. Rob Schneider’s comedy special on Fox Nation. But I did admit he had a really funny 10-minute bit where he did a Trump impression, but it wasn’t political. He was just talking about his experience with Trump as a person. It could have been about any celebrity. And it was funny. So I admitted it.

Painting anything in a broad stroke… I did a whole thing on Trump’s Charlottesville comments explaining why he said that Nazis are very fine people. And by doing that, I went through literally minute by minute every single thing he said, I didn’t cut anything out, so anytime a conservative was like, you’re misquoting, I say, watch the whole thing. And you will not believe how many people on the right have come back to me being like either, damn, I still don’t agree with you, but you were right. You didn’t cut anything out, or like, oh, wow, I really didn’t understand the full context, and I watched this whole 35 minute video, and now I do.

And so doing that instead of straight villainization, because these people villainize themselves. If you just give a little bit of grace. No one is right all the time. No one is wrong all the time. We need a baseline for humanity. There is a baseline that if you straight up see me as a womb on legs, probably, you have to address that on your own. This is not us to handhold you through. But there are a lot of other people who just don’t know anything else. And you can’t blame someone for ignorance if you don’t tell them where to find the knowledge.

Francesca Fiorentini:  That’s so true. That’s very real.

Maximillian Alvarez:  I think that is a beautiful, powerful point to end on. I apologize to everyone in the live chat if we didn’t get to your questions, but I think you’ll agree —

Kat Abu:  Shout out to the two people’s questions we answered. We hope you’re satisfied.

Maximillian Alvarez:  [Laughs] Shout out to the big two. I mean, you guys did address a lot of the questions that were asked, even if we didn’t directly pose them, but I think everyone watching will agree this was a feast for the mind and heart, and I think I’m feeling better prepared to head into this darkness, and I’m feeling at least a little more emboldened, knowing that we’ve got great folks like you, folks like the people watching, folks like the folks at The Real News in the backroom right now, making this all happen. Thank you, sisters.

Francesca Fiorentini:  Thanks for having us.

Maximillian Alvarez:  We’ve got each other and we can make it.

And to everyone watching, I wanted to ask you to please go support, subscribe to every channel that Kat, Francesca, and Abby are on. We need their voices now more than ever. And if you don’t want independent media to go away, you got to support it. So please go support it, share it, send it to folks that you know who you think will want to watch it, anything you can do to help them out. We need that work. We need your support here at The Real News. The overall message is, is that we need you guys to keep going. So please go subscribe to their channels, follow them on any platform that you’re on, and if you can, please donate to the incredible work that they’re doing.

Kat, Francesca, and Abby, who had to depart 20 minutes ago, it has been a true honor being on this stream with you. Thank you so much, and solidarity from Baltimore.

Francesca Fiorentini:  Likewise. Thank you.

Kat Abu:  Everyone. Go outside.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Go outside and touch grass for The Real News Network. This is Maximilian Alvarez signing off. Please donate using the buttons on the side of this video. Share this livestream with your friends, family members, coworkers. Please go to therealnews.com/donate and support our work today. It really makes a difference. But more importantly, and most of all, take care of yourselves, take care of each other, solidarity forever.

Thank you so much for watching The Real News Network, where we lift up the voices, stories and struggles that you care about most, and we need your help to keep doing this work. So please tap your screen now, subscribe, and donate to The Real News Network. Solidarity forever.

What happened in the 2024 elections, and what happens now? Donald J. Trump is headed back to the White House, Republicans will control the Senate, and it’s possible they will control all three branches of government when the dust settles. Democrats’ “blue wall” crumbled in the face of the MAGA-led “red wave,” but that picture gets more complicated when we survey the results of other key races and ballot measures across the country. So, what really happened on Tuesday? What do the results tell us about the political landscape and the balance of power in the US? How did Democrats lose so soundly, how did Republicans pull off such sizable wins? And what implications do the elections have for the future of civil rights, immigration, protest and social movements, public policy, the climate, Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, and America’s place on the world stage?

In this post-election livestream, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez and Marc Steiner, host of The Marc Steiner Show, are joined by a range of guests to help break down the wins, losses, and strategies for moving forward from the 2024 elections. Guests include: scholar-activist and artist Eman Abdelhadi; Rick Perlstein, columnist at The American Prospect and author of numerous books like “Nixonland,” “Reaganland,” and “Before the Storm”; Laura Flanders, host of “Laura Flanders & Friends” on PBS; John Nichols, National Affairs Correspondent at The Nation; Bill Gallegos of the Mexico Solidarity Project; and TRNN reporters Taya Graham and Stephen Janis, who have been on the ground in Wisconsin all week.

Studio: David Hebden, Cameron Granadino, Adam Coley
Pre-Production: Maximillian Alvarez, Kayla Rivara, Jocelyn Dombroski

Transcript

Maximillian Alvarez:  Welcome, everyone, to our postelection breakdown livestream here on The Real News Network. My name is Maximillian Alvarez, I’m the editor-in-chief here at The Real News, and we are so grateful to have you all with us.

Marc Steiner:  And I’m Marc Steiner here, host of The Marc Steiner Show on The Real News. I’m also happy to be here.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Donald J. Trump is headed back to the White House for a second term. Republicans will control the Senate, and it’s possible they will control all three branches of government when the dust settles: the executive, legislature, and the judiciary. Republicans currently have the lead in the battle to control the House of Representatives, with 207 seats compared to Democrats 194 seats. But enough races remain competitive and uncalled as of this recording that the future of the House is still uncertain.

In the presidential race, however, Democrats’ blue wall crumbled in the face of the MAGA-led red wave. Trump not only won the key swing states of Georgia and North Carolina, but he also flipped Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. All of those states, with the exception of North Carolina, went for Joe Biden in 2020. And Trump currently has commanding leads in Nevada and Arizona.

In these last harried months before Election Day, Democrats made a cynical, dangerous, and fateful calculation. They bet that a winning coalition of today’s never-Trump Republicans, i.e. yesterday’s neocons, undecided “moderates”, and all manner of people terrified into submission to vote against Trump would counteract the precious working-class youth, Arab and Muslim American, progressive and other voters that they have hemorrhaged by recklessly continuing to fund and support Israel’s genocidal regime, by presenting Harris’s platform as a lockstep continuation of the Biden administration, and by failing to articulate a strong, populist vision that spoke to working people’s deeply felt lack of economic security. And they were wrong, catastrophically wrong.

So what happened on Tuesday, and what happens now? What do the results tell us about the political landscape and the balance of power in the United States? How did Democrats lose so soundly? How did Republicans pull off such sizable wins?

That picture does admittedly get more complicated when we survey the results of other key races and ballot measures across the country, and we are going to talk about that today as well.

But what implications do the elections have for the future of civil rights, immigration, abortion rights, protest and social movements, public policy, the climate, Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, and America’s place on the world stage? On today’s livestream, we’re going to dig into all of this. And this will not be the only livestream we have to address these issues.

But we’ve got lots of incredible guests with powerful voices and vital perspectives coming on over the next two hours to help us unpack your biggest questions about the elections. We’ve got scholar activists and artists and Eman Abdelhadi; we’ve got Rick Perlstein, columnist at the American Prospect and author of numerous books like Nixonland, Reaganland, and Before the Storm; we’ve got the great Laura Flanders, host of Laura Flanders & Friends on PBS; John Nichols, national affairs correspondent at The Nation; Bill Gallegos of the Mexico Solidarity Project; and Real News reporters Taya Graham and Stephen Janis, who have been on the ground in Wisconsin all week.

And we’re going to bring on our first guest, Eman Abdelhadi in a minute, but by way of getting us there, Marc, I want to turn to you at the top here and just get your thoughts on where we are right now and how we got here.

Marc Steiner:  We’re in a very scary place, and I think I have to lay some of what happened here at the doorsteps of the Democratic Party, who played a very narrow campaign, thinking they could go to the right to win, which was absurd. And we see what’s happened.

I think that it’s interesting to me how the Democrats have lost their ability to find their roots. By that I mean their roots were in labor unions and organizing and the Civil Rights Movement and organizing. They’ve lost the organizing roots. They weren’t out there at the grassroots. They weren’t pulling people in. They weren’t doing a media campaign that talked about not just the dangers ahead if Trump wins, but talk about what the vision was for a different kind of America. They didn’t do any of that, and I think they put the nails in their own coffin.

Maximillian Alvarez:  They tried to articulate a vision, and it was not a compelling one. I think that’s also a clear takeaway. It just wasn’t hitting. And we’re going to talk about why, over the course of this livestream and over the course of our continuing coverage and your coverage all the way up to the election and beyond has been incredible, so thank you for all that work, brother.

And thank you all once again for joining us. We know you’ve got a lot of questions, we’re going to try to get to as many of them as we can, but please do send us in your questions and we will try to address them in more segments, more livestreams with more guests in the coming days and weeks.

Right now I want to bring on our first incredible guest, Eman Abdelhadi, scholar, activist, and artist who has been doing incredible coverage for outlets like In These Times in the runup to this week’s elections. Eman, thank you so much for joining us on The Real News Network today. I really, really appreciate it.

Eman Abdelhadi:  Thanks for having me, Max.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Well, we need your powerful voice, sister, now more than ever. And you know as well as we do that right now, a lot of people in a lot of high places are going to be looking for people to blame this week’s results on, and one of the utmost obvious and softest targets that they’re already going after is the Gaza Solidarity Movement. Anyone and everyone who expressed genuine concerns over Harris’s continued support of Israel’s genocidal Zionist regime.

So taking those narratives out of our heads for a second and asking you to help us unpack this, what role do you see, from your perspective, what role has Israel and Harris’s support for the Zionist genocide seemed to play in this election writ large? And then, what is a second Trump presidency going to mean for Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, and all of that moving forward?

Eman Abdelhadi:  I think we have to think about the voter who has been watching children under the rubble every day for the last year, for over a year now, watching a genocide unfold on their phones every single day. And knowing that this system, that this ruling elite has been completely committed to this genocide, has gaslit us about it over and over.

Then this moment of asking this voter to put all of that aside and show up to the polls and vote for the people who have not just enacted this genocide but have patronized the people protesting it, have criminalized the people protesting it, and are offering very little else, are not saying, OK, put aside the genocide because we have this great amazing vision for you on this other ground. They’re not doing that either. And so I think a lot of those voters stayed home. Kamala lost 10 million votes from previous elections.

I think that there’s this way that we ask the left to put on their big boy pants and, as a recent article said, to basically be these hyper-rational, focus on strategy voters, whereas we make a lot of room and leeway for other voters’ proclivities. There’s a sense that you are just going to be able to put aside Gaza. I think a lot of people didn’t, and they weren’t being offered anything meaningful — And, in fact, they were being told that they shouldn’t care at all.

Now, will Trump be worse on Gaza? It’s actually hard to tell. His rhetoric is certainly a lot worse. His foreign policy was really hard to pin down, I think, in his last presidency. He’s certainly no friend of Arabs. He’s no friend of Muslims. He’s no friend of the Palestinian people. His rhetoric has been terrible.

But I think that people need to understand that, in terms of US support for Israel, there has been no red line and there have no been no checks on the Israeli government. So it’s hard to imagine a worse case. It’s hard to imagine things getting worse in terms of the Middle East, which is what we’ve been threatened with this whole time, this whole campaign — Oh, it’s going to get worse, it’s going to get worse. And I think what voters have been saying is, what is worse than a genocide and an open tap of weapons and support that no amount of brutality has stopped?

So I don’t know what’s going to happen with Iran. We do know that Trump tends to be an isolationist. I think he’s less committed to the vision of the world with US leadership that Clinton and Bush era politicians seem to be arguing for. I don’t know what that’s going to mean on the ground. I think it’s going to be a question of what becomes lucrative for him.

Maximillian Alvarez:  And what about, I guess this is a question that’s on a lot of our minds. It’s a question that makes me think of the fact that the last time we were together in person was there in Chicago, covering Gaza solidarity protests around the DNC in August.

Right now, I think the knee-jerk reaction from a lot of folks is we gotta hit the streets. We gotta hit the streets even harder. We gotta protest even louder. And I’m not saying that we don’t need to do that, but I am saying that the first story I reported on in Trump’s first term was when his administration was cheering on the mass arrest and the attempts to charge mass amounts of protesters, journalists, legal observers at the inauguration protests with felony riot charges. So we are entering a new terrain when it comes to grassroots action, protest actions, and otherwise.

So as you see it, as someone who’s covered these protest movements all year, where do you see us heading in terms of the terrain of struggle, particularly as it pertains to protests moving forward in the Trump administration?

Eman Abdelhadi:  We always knew that whoever was going to be in the White House, headed to the White House in January, was going to be an enemy. And the question is which enemy do we have? And right now we have an enemy that has no qualms about calling the military, has no qualms about criminalizing protests.

Now, a lot of us have been facing off against the police and these repressive tactics under the previous administration. So I think we need to think about our tactics not from a place of fear and from a place of, well, what are they going to do, necessarily, in response, but more where are we as a movement? We need to think about where our movement is in terms of its potential, in terms of its energy. And I think that street mobilizations and street actions have been really important for growing our base, but we’ve also hit up against the limits of them a little bit.

And so I think that what I’m seeing on the ground is a lot of people turning towards organizing and power building as opposed to mobilizing just street actions. Thinking about your workplace, your school, your neighborhood, thinking about your local politicians and your local political scene and whatever other institutions are within your sphere of influence, and thinking about how do I hold these institutions accountable to their relationship with the state of Israel to their complicity in the genocide?

For me, it feels clear that the American public is going to have to divest from Israel before we force the ruling class to do it. And we are going to have to do that through all of this bottom-up work and grassroots organizing.

So I think we should still be on the streets. I think we have to protect the right to be on the streets, but I also think that we have been expanding into other tactics as well.

Marc Steiner:  I watched this whole thing unfold and the Democrats just blew it. Kamala Harris and her team did not come up with an alternative to what’s been happening. I don’t expect the Democrats to go, oh, we’re pro-Palestine and goodbye Israel. I don’t expect that at all. But what I did expect and what they should have done at the very least is to say, we are going to end the violence right now. We’re going to do something to build peace in the Middle East, to build a peace platform. And it may have saved them votes, but B, it just set it apart.

Because you can’t… It was just really disappointing to watch this unfold. And I think that I’ve been in this struggle around the Palestinian Israeli struggle since 1968, and we’ve been fighting against this occupation for that long, and organizing and coming up with a strategy is what has to happen now. The Democrats have seen what they’ve blown, and I’ve talked to a couple of people in the Democratic Party over the last two days, and people really have to push to change the way they approach the subject, period. It’s just obscene. And that’s a huge reason why they lost.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Well, and to turn that into a question for Eman, I mean, again, I don’t want to ask you to speak for whole swaths of voting constituencies here, but again, having watched what we watch, having heard what Marc just said, I mean, what would a better alternative vision have been or needs to be moving forward to get the faith back from so many folks? Not just Arab and Muslim Americans, but working class voters, youth voters, folks around the country who feel like even in the face of a threat like Donald Trump, that the prospect of things getting better is just so hopeless that they stay home or they don’t put their faith in any of the options on offer. What does an alternative to that even look like?

Eman Abdelhadi:  I think a left wing candidate… Listen, I don’t think our full liberatory potential as human beings is ever going to be on the ballot in the current system as it is. We’re never going to have liberation on the ballot. But I think that, even within the current system, if you had offered people a left-wing, truly progressive alternative with actual policies.

At the DNC, she said, we’re going to build the most lethal fighting force on earth. She said this to her voters who largely are anti-war, anti weaponry. And there are these ways that they could have even lied. What’s so wild about having watched this campaign, it’s like, you could have lied and said you were going to do more than you did and then ended up doing what every Democrat has done, which has moved to the right when you’re in office.

But they couldn’t even offer that platform. And I think that speaks to the intense disjuncture between this party and the people who are supposed to be its base that somewhere there’s this consultant class of Democrats who truly believes that if you send Bill Clinton to Michigan to speak to Arab communities about how terrible Gazans basically deserve to die, that was a good election strategy on the eve of the election.

So I think there’s so many ways that they could have done things differently. And within our lifetimes we’ve seen that. We’ve seen the energy around the Bernie campaign. Bernie is not as far left as I would like him to be, but I even knocked on doors for him. We saw the energy that could happen if you had an actual progressive candidate on the ballot.

And here in this election, we saw that she lost states that voted for left-wing policies. In my own home state in Missouri, voters voted overwhelmingly for Trump, and they also voted for a minimum wage hike.

They’re trying to spin this right now as America moving to the right ideologically because they voted for Trump. And I don’t think that that’s what we’re seeing here. I think what we’re seeing is that there’s a referendum on Democrats’ economic vision, on their vision of the world as a world that’s led by US hegemony, and they’re losing that referendum, the people have voted against it.

And those two things, the domestic side and the international side, are two parts of the same coin. We need a candidate who says, I care more about Americans lives here. I’m going to actually invest in working-class people here, and it’s more important than protecting the interests of corporations or weapons manufacturers or Israel. And well, we haven’t seen that. And I think if we had seen that, there was a moment where Kamala could have pivoted to that and she didn’t, and she lost as a result.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Also worth noting that not only did Missouri vote to raise the state minimum wage, but it was also one of the seven states that voted to enshrine abortion rights in its state charter along with Arizona, Colorado, New York, Maryland, here in our home state, Montana, Nevada.

As I said at the top, the picture does get more complicated than just the red Trumpian wave when you look all the way up and down the ballot. And I want us to continue to unpack that over the course of this livestream.

But it does raise an important question here, Eman, that I wanted to pose to you because I know we only have you for a few more minutes here. As we said, the pundit class, the consultant class, Democrats at the top of the party, they, they’re going to do what they always do, and they’re going to look for a way to blame voters for the outcome that voters kept telling ’em they were going to get if they didn’t change course.

But they don’t really seem to have a case to make here the way that they tried and succeeded in doing in a lot of ways after 2016. Because, now granted, in terms of the national total voter results, there are still a lot of results in populous states like California that are going to be counted. So we’re expecting that the total voter turnout will be closer to what it was in 2020, but it still appears to be less than what it was in 2020.

And there also appear to be key dropoffs in Democratic support, but those dropoffs do not correspond to the amount of people who voted for say, Jill Stein or Cornel West. So it doesn’t even feel like Democrats and their supportive pundits in the media can even say all those people who voted third party are the difference that could have swung this to Harris. It feels like something else is going on here.

I just wanted to get your thoughts there with the caveat that more is going to become clear in the coming days and weeks. Exit polls need to be taken with a huge pinch of salt, but based on the results that we have, what do you actually think are the takeaways that people should have rather than trying to just blame this all on uncommitted folks or people who voted third party?

Eman Abdelhadi:  I think the takeaway is that the Democratic Party has abandoned working-class Americans, and it’s abandoned any pretense that it was the more peaceful anti-war party. And as a result, its base has abandoned it. And I think there’s this way that, if you don’t offer something exciting and something interesting in a world, in a country that is increasingly disillusioned with the whole system, is increasingly disillusioned with voting, you’re just not going to win.

And so I think that’s the key takeaway. But I think, broadly, as a leftist, as someone who, like I said, doesn’t believe liberation is ever going to fully be on the ballot, but that the ballot is worth engaging and that it’s not something to throw away and that it is important and that we should participate as leftists, we should be seizing any ground that we can. I think we have to think broadly about the world we need to build and what the hurdles are to getting there and how to push for that.

It became clear to me around the DNC that the electoral possibilities of ending the genocide in Gaza had been reached, that we were not going to push her any further, and that it was time to focus our energy back to local organizing. So I think for each of us, there has to be this question of what do I need to do to protect the people around me and to advance the causes that I care about in this moment of incredible weakness for the left?

Maximillian Alvarez:  Brother Marc, any final questions you have for Eman?

Marc Steiner:  Yeah, I am very curious, from all the work you’ve done and what we face now in the Middle East and building a coalition that makes some changes here in America, how do you see that unfolding? How do you see that happening? We talked a bit about organizing and more. Because it infuriates me watching these Democrats not be able to make the leap to say end the war in Israel-Gaza, stop it because we are the only country on the planet that has the power to stop it. So I’m curious, what do you think the next moves are to push that and to push that as an idea for the mass of Americans to take hold of and to change the Democrats, if you can?

Eman Abdelhadi:  I think that we need to make commitment to this war extremely costly. I think we do that by leveraging our power through things like unions. I think we need to basically create both social and economic costs to continuing to support this war. We sort of did do that in terms of the vote. I think Gaza was a part of why she didn’t win.

But I think also this is a long-term battle where we need to basically build power, whether that’s through street mobilizations that disrupt business as usual, or through moving… Labor has been solidly on the side of Palestine, but there needs to be more work in that arena.

I think the broader problem is that we are left after decades of neoliberalization in a version of this country that makes it incredibly hard to leverage any people power. The fact that we have so few unions, and we’re stuck in these kind of ideological debates without a lot of actual points of leverage.

So I think a lot of the work that’s been happening in the cultural realm has been really important. But what we’ve seen is that hasn’t translated into policy. And I think organizing locally, so here in Illinois for example, we are organizing around a divestment campaign for Illinois bonds. So I think there needs to be a systematic attack on all of these links that bolster the Israeli government and its murderous campaigns.

I wish I had a silver bullet —

Marc Steiner:  I wish we all had it.

Maximillian Alvarez:  None of us have a silver bullet, but… We only have a couple minutes left with Eman, and then we’re going to welcome on our next guests, Rick Perlstein and Laura Flanders. And so, by way of asking you this final question, Eman, Marc and I were talking about this leading into Tuesday about what the message was going to be if Harris won. Because I think for the left or whatever that means today, or for people who have principled commitments that you could define as more left-leaning or progressive, there was going to be a very sobering reality on the other side of a Harris win, which is that the progressive wing of the Democratic Party is at its institutionally most powerless point.

It takes two election cycles to wash the Bernie Sanders stain out. And Harris would’ve gone into her administration feeling next to no compulsion whatsoever to even cater to that Bernie side, that progressive side of the Democratic Party that Biden felt compelled to cater to in 2020. There was going to be a real soul searching question of what is the left, where is the left, and what do people who believe in that vision of the world, where are we and what do we do moving forward into a Harris administration?

Now we got Trump. So in a lot of ways, the equation’s the same: Institutionally, we ain’t got no power in that administration, and we have less and less in all three branches of government. So that is both a terrifying prospect and a critical one because, for all the reasons that we can justifiably say people want an alternative so that we’re not in this same situation in four years, that needs to start now, that needs to start yesterday. And a lot of people are feeling maybe too scared and too anxious to even begin thinking in those terms.

So I wanted to give you the final word here. If you could speak to people who are in that position, people who desperately want an alternative but are currently fearful of what the next Trump administration’s going to be, don’t know where to start, don’t know what our goal needs to be beyond just defense of ourselves, our communities, and our livelihoods. What would your message be to those folks right now?

Eman Abdelhadi:  I would say start with the local level. I would say we need to build a bench of progressives that can move through these… I mean, in 2018 after there was a blue wave of folks that were elected all over on all levels of government who were progressive and on the progressive end of the party. And all of that dissipated, they got eaten up, either they got co-opted into mainstream Democratic Party politics, or they got marginalized. But I think that it’s important to think about these moments as of potential mobilization.

So I think on the electoral level, we need to build a bench of progressives who can move through local elections and eventually make their way up. And we need to keep them accountable through the movement, not by constantly immediately canceling them all the time, but constantly holding them back, accountable to their base.

And then I think people need to organize. The reality is I didn’t feel I had very much power in the previous administration either, and no one that I organized with felt like we had power vis-a-vis the last administration. And so I think we need to build coalitions and organize, again, in our spheres of influence, whether that’s our workplaces or our schools or our districts, and build these coalitions that can either be used electorally or, more importantly, for broader movement wins.

Maximillian Alvarez:  So that is the great Eman Abdelhadi. You should read anything and everything Eman has ever written, follow her on social media. Scholar, activist, artist Eman, thank you so much for joining us on The Real News. Thank you for everything that you’ve done, and we’re sending all our love and solidarity to you from here in Baltimore.

Marc Steiner:  Amen to that.

Eman Abdelhadi:  I’m sending it right back, Max. Thanks so much.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Thank you, sister. Thank you. So we’re going to bring on our next guest in a moment. We’ve had them on before — In fact, we had them on together to help us break down the Trump conviction news that feels like it happened 10 years ago, but it was only a few months ago.

And we said rightly then, and we were addressing this to all the folks out there who were taking a premature victory lap and hoping that the legal system of checks and balances would take the Trump problem off the country’s plate back in the spring. Our message was very clear: That’s not going to happen. What in the Trump era would make you think that he’s just going to go away or that the system is going to treat him with the same callousness that it does working people like us? And here we are, months later, in a much different world.

And so we’re very excited to have our guests Rick Perlstein and the great Laura Flanders joining us today at this critical and dark moment to help us make sense of this. Laura, of course, is the host of Laura Flanders & Friends, which you can catch every week on PBS. She is a journalist legend, a hero of mine, as is brother Rick Perlstein, the most brilliant minds analyzing the American right that the American left has ever produced.

Laura, Rick, thank you both so much for joining us today on The Real News Network. We really appreciate it.

Laura Flanders:  It’s great to be with you. Glad to be here, Max. Good to see you, Rick.

Rick Perlstein:  It’s a comforting place to be in a very uncomfortable time.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Good to see you both. Well Marc, let’s open it up with you.

Marc Steiner:  I’d like to hear both of your analysis about what just happened here, how the Democrats blew this and the growing power of the right. I’ve been covering the growing power of the right in this country for some time now here for Real News. And what we’re seeing now is they almost have a trifecta politically in Washington DC. It could be extremely dangerous for everything from Civil Rights to labor rights to the future of our country and our democracy, everything’s at stake. I’m curious, how did we get here? How do you think at this moment we came to this point?

Rick Perlstein:  Can I start, Laura?

Laura Flanders:  You’re the historian, Rick, go for it [Steiner laughs].

Rick Perlstein:  I’m going to lean away from any preliminary judgment at this point that the Harris campaign necessarily blew it. I mean, maybe they did. But I’m just going to give a little example of my day-to-day life. My car got towed, and at the impound lot in the middle of a neighborhood in Chicago, the Mexican American, clearly working-class clerk, we got into a conversation about the election and he said he was for Trump, and he said he heard that every undocumented immigrant was getting a $9,000 check.

I just got the latest issue of the Economist, and the cover is the American economy is the envy of the world. Of course, we still have a profoundly unequal economy. There’s lots of vultures, for example, in the housing market who are just stripping people clean.

But if you look back also at, say, in the Biden administration, the fact that we had a party where young Black men were called super predators, and now they’re nominating public defenders to the bench, or the fact that Kamala Harris chose as her running mate, basically, a Scandinavian social democrat who, when the federal government took away, the Biden administration, let’s be frank, took away the COVID stimulus checks for families, he just brought ’em back.

So I don’t think it’s as easy as just saying the administration and the campaign rejected the left, and that’s why they lost. I mean, here I am in Chicago and we elected the Bernie coalition, and they just screwed up everything. The mayor has a 15% approval rating.

I’m going to really place the blame on the fact that people only know what the candidates are saying or doing through mediation. And that medium is the media.

I just got a text from a friend of mine who works at a major metropolitan newspaper, basically in a blue city in a red state, and he said, journalism deserved what it has coming to it. Discussion in the newsroom — This is a newspaper newsroom about Project 2025. So very clear no one’s seriously grappled with anything before today.

Just one more example: inflation. There’s this huge debate over inflation. Did anyone in the media ever say that the president really has no control over inflation? So to me, the reason the word “fascism” is useful is because it’s only possible in this deranged information environment in which it’s very hard for people to grasp reality.

Here we have this guy, Elon Musk, and I was looking at Axios today, and Axios’s report was, well, maybe Elon Musk isn’t so dumb after all, maybe he’d made an amazing investment by buying Twitter. And by saying that, they’re saying this is a guy who basically was turned over the keys to something that’s going to be like state media, a state propaganda apparatus. He’s going to be the nation’s Goebbels. And one of these newsletters of the elite capitalist masters of the universe in Washington. All they can say about this is, great business move.

So yeah, I wish it was as easy as saying Kamala screwed up. I kind of dug what she was doing. I think that it’s a calamity and a disaster that she wasn’t able to say anything about Gaza that was productive in any way, shape, or form. But quite frankly, massacring Brown people is not a big problem for a lot of Americans, as we’ve seen from them choosing Donald Trump.

So I think the biggest crisis moving forward has to be dealing with this media that just does not know how to represent the truth to citizens in a way that allows them to act like citizens.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Laura, let’s toss it to you.

Laura Flanders:  Well, so many things there. I want to come back to the media, of course. Huge, huge issue. I will give just a few quick takes on the Harris campaign. For sure, I don’t think there’s anything she could have done that necessarily would’ve turned a totally different result, maybe incrementally different. But I do think it is really hard to run on and also against the economic record of the administration that you’ve been part of for the last four years.

I also think it is really hard to run against autocracy and war and for human rights and be part of an administration that is flooding weapons to a foreign autocrat committing genocide. I think it’s super hard to run a bottom-up, people-powered, we are democracy in action Democratic campaign that nonetheless relies on big dollar donors by private interests. That’s our system, that it fundamentally instills a level of hypocrisy and servitude into our political process.

Finally, I think it is really hard to run as the nation’s first woman of color president in a continent as big as ours with 330 million people, and do it in 106 days. So those are my hot takes on the Harris aspect of the story.

The other aspect of the story, though, that I think Rick is getting at so well is it’s not about one party or one campaign or let alone one politician. There have been structural phenomena playing out here over decades that finally came to roost this election. Did the media ignore important aspects of what was actually happening under the Biden administration? Absolutely. When Nicholas Lehman writes in The New Yorker, in the issue that comes out the week before the election, Bidenomics is working, why is nobody noticing? You’re like, well, because the media, so-called, most of our most influential media speakers are those cable network pundits who never leave the studio.

So while Nicholas Lehman, bless him, goes out there and actually talks to working-class people at the factory, making the school buses, making green school buses with union labor in a neighborhood that needed employment, employing people that were historically disadvantaged, all thanks to millions of dollars coming in from the Biden administration, it’s too little too late. And where was the reporting all this time about how this policy was actually playing out?

I’m with Rick. I was never a huge Biden fan during the financial crisis. We remember the role that he played benefiting, privileging banking over others. But heck, in this administration, Bidenomics showed the markers of the influence of the Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren wing of the party. It really did. And there was a lot to actually run on and talk about. Not happy talk about how inflation is nothing and everybody’s lives are great and the market’s great, therefore you should feel better than you do. But actual real life stuff about what’s happening on the ground.

That’s about as positive as you’re going to get from me about a Democratic administration [Steiner laughs]. But I do think there were things to report on there that simply got missed, and Harris could have run on some of that, but she was so intimidated, I think, by the frames that the media had put on this election, which was that everybody was upset about the economy — What do we mean by the economy, anyway? Who’s out there talking about what that means? We have many economies in this country, people getting by in all sorts of different ways and people being helped by government programs in all sorts of different ways. We could have talked about a lot of it.

So I think there’s the problem of the media, what they actually do today. There’s the problem of how much advertising money they absorb. What if they just said tomorrow, we’re not running these ads? But instead they accept the cable companies, which are for-profit corporations, part of international global corporate capital, accept millions of dollars of advertising money to run ads that are lies. And we know that they were lies that worked. Lies around trans people, “men” in sports — Not true. That’s not the issue. And lies of every other possible kind.

And this comes back to our bigger fundamental problem we have — Well, two, they both have to do with capitalism. One of them has to do with you cannot have a democracy… I mean, Bernie’s right, we shouldn’t have billionaires. You can’t have a democracy when you have billionaires allowed to pump as much money as they want to into our elections. It just doesn’t work.

Secondly, we have had an extractive economy that has extracted culture and value and understanding and care and attention as much as it has extracted precious minerals from underneath the ground of our communities around this country, and concentrated all those resources and attention and information and caring in a few hands in a few places.

So we do have a lot of this country that has been ignored for way too long in terms of the culture, what they see reflected back to them through their media, the kinds of people they see talking back to them about the nature of the world.

And I think that that is a longstanding problem that has been going on for years. When people feel ignored, alienated, scared, alone, remote, disinvested in, not cared about, it is really easy for one to create a sense of community of the aggrieved, and a community of the aggrieved that are led to believe, through endless messaging, that it’s not the wealthy and the extractors that are the problem, it’s the scrappy immigrants who are coming to take their jobs.

And that’s what happened this time. It’s not magic, it’s not rocket science, it’s not breaking news that that’s been going on, but that is, I believe, at the heart of what happened today, and leaves us with an enormous job of how do we reinvest attention, caring, consideration, not to mention resources, into communities that don’t make it into our news?

Marc Steiner:  A couple of things here that popped up as both of you were talking. One has to do, we don’t have to belabor this, but the Democrats had a billion dollars to spend. They could have told the story, hired organizers, really pushed a different agenda, exposed the things you were just talking about, Laura, all across the media. They could have done that and had people on the ground organizing. They didn’t do it. They did not organize this. And I guess having spent years as an organizer and running campaigns, give me a billion dollars, I’ll help you change it. That really drove me nuts.

But the other thing is, let’s talk about what’s going to happen now.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Well, let me hop in there real quick. I want us to end with the what happens now question. But by way of getting there, I want to comment on the economy and a question about the media, if that’s cool. Because again, agree with what you guys are saying, taking it all in, appreciate your perspectives as always, and I want to just also offer a perspective here.

As folks watching this know, The Real News Network is a nonprofit newsroom. We’re not competing with CNN or stuff like that, but we’re small, mighty, we care, and we try. And we talk to working people around the country week in, week out. I interview tons of them on my show working people all the time.

And what I also want to add to the conversation here is that in those conversations, you will hear how the people’s perception of the economy and people’s lived experience, it produces a mixed bag when we’re talking about the economy. It is not as simple as saying Bidenomics is working, why aren’t people talking about it? Depends on what people were talking about.

I interviewed railroad workers last week on my show saying, hey, Biden and Congress broke your guys’ strike. How are people feeling right now? How are they going to vote? The answer was people are feeling demoralized. Our strike was broken under Biden’s administration and the rail companies got everything that they want. Then two months after we were forced to accept a contract, the derailment in East Palestine happened. They’ve been left behind. Railroad workers feel just as demoralized as they did three years ago before the country started to care about ’em again. They barely got any sick days. They got a little pay bump, but they’re still being run into the ground. So in terms of Bidenomics working for them, it’s not.

In terms of public school teachers in counties all across the country, especially in places like Minnesota where I’ve interviewed folks, they can’t hire educators because the pay is so low and they can’t retain folks. Nurses, healthcare workers, education workers are constantly telling us that they are being burnt out because they’re having more work piled onto fewer workers at pay that is not keeping pace with the cost of living.

If you add into that young people who are dealing with a massive debt burden from getting the education we were told to get when we were young, those student loan repayments started up a few months ago. Housing costs still are skyrocketing. Bidenomics is not working for a lot of folks there, and they’re feeling it.

Now, again, Trump’s not going to address that, but it paints a really complicated picture. As Laura said, there are many economies.

Laura Flanders:  Well, it’s a complicated picture though, Max. If you had been, I bet if you had been running for office, you would’ve said, listen, it’s not working for everybody. We want to do more, do it better. If you were a Democrat, you would’ve run on, we’ve been at least doing this and we could be doing more instead of we agree it’s been a big problem, which is what she basically ran on. So instead of saying, we need more of this, and this is what’s been happening, and this is what still needs to be done, she ran away from the whole story, which I think was a big mistake.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Yeah, I agree. I think also people have a very distorted picture, which brings us back to the media, about what the scene is for working-class people and organize labor in this country —

Laura Flanders:  Yes, they don’t have a picture.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Folks still think we’re in the midst of this great organizing wave, when the organizing wave that emerged out of COVID is still running through the mud of an underfunded NLRB in a viciously anti-union corporate class that has managed to stall so many of those unionization efforts.

So again, complicated picture, point very well taken. This brings us back to the question of the media, because I wrote this piece last week for In These Times and The Real News, a deeply personal piece trying to address this question. Because I went back home and visited my grandfather who’s dying of Alzheimer’s, who’s obsessively watching Trump and Fox News and OAN. And I sat there in his living room watching the screen that he watches that connects him to the world outside of his window, and the world looked very different than the one that I see watching the world in my social circles through the media that I consume, the reporting that I do.

And that is a huge unspoken crisis that we are experiencing in the digital age right now, where you could be seeing and imagining a very different country than the person who sits next to you on the bus depending on what channels you watch, what apps you use, what podcasts you listen to.

So there’s been a fracturing of not only the mass public that maybe television commanded a large audience of 30, 40 years ago, but that has translated into a very fractured sense of the country that we’re actually living in.

And so, I wanted to ask, Rick, the media is one of the core pillars of the Infernal Triangle that you’re writing about so much at the American Prospect. Can you talk a bit about that reality warping and reality encasing effect of the fractured media ecosystem we’re living in now? And Laura, as someone who has been working in media and journalism, you’re still on public TV, how do we fight that?

Rick Perlstein:  Imagine if your work and your reporters in Wisconsin or East Palestine, if that was happening on the scale of the resources of a New York Times or a Washington Post or a CNN instead of your hard scrabble crew, literally probably literally a thousandfold resources, we would have a different country because the politicians would receive different signals, because they’re very solicitous of what the media says about them and what’s going out there.

Take something like crime and crime committed by migrants. Every educated person knows that immigrants commit violent crimes on a level far lower than native born people. So logically speaking, if you want a less crime-ridden country, you let in more immigrants, not less. And the lie that immigrants are “invading”, which is just fascist rhetoric. The idea that a poor, huddled mass is yearning to breathe free are the people who are the threat to the country, it is like something out of Nazi Germany or Pravda and the Soviet Union.

A couple of weeks ago, I was in New York and I went to Ellis Island. So I really saw Ellis Island — I don’t know if some of you guys who are older might remember that Ellis Island was rehabbed and reopened after a long closure in the 1980s during the Reagan era. At the same time, they restored the Statue of Liberty. There was all this scaffolding around it, and it was really a time when the civic religion had a basic grasp and basic beliefs that immigrants were a good thing.

And one of the things I found so fascinating was they had all these oral histories in which people told their stories, what it was like going through Ellis Island. One guy was like, there was a law that you had to have $25, so we would pass the same $25 down the line, and the immigrant inspectors looked the other way. They knew we didn’t have $25.

And the fact that this was upheld in the museum as a story that we were supposed to celebrate, showing the gumption and hustle of immigrants, instead of the story now — Which is told also by, unfortunately, Kamala Harris, did she ever say once that we want more immigrants? That immigrants are good? She said, we are a nation of immigrants, which is a very mild thing.

Instead, the story about immigrants passing that $25 down the line would be, wow, these immigrants are cheating us. And that’s somehow become this bipartisan thing, and it is backed by this lie that’s also passed on in the media because the Republicans say it. And if the Republicans say it, we have to report it without fact checking because fact checking would be bias, that America is suffering an epidemic of violent crime. I think, really, it’s very fundamental.

And then you get to the issue of social media and their algorithms that basically valorize people, basically lying in order to create fights, which creates more engagement. I think that the revolution now flows through the media. If we had an honest media that provided a reasonable picture onto the world, everything would change. Everything would change.

Laura Flanders:  Rick, you mentioned in passing Goebbels, and I wrote a piece for The Guardian earlier this year that referred to Musk as today’s Goebbels. And I didn’t just mean because of the role he is playing in communication, but structurally. People perhaps don’t remember Goebbels, the communications director for the Hitler administration, as it were, the Hitler regime. He didn’t just do propaganda. He distributed cheap radio sets to Germans all across the country so that they boosted the economy of the people that owned the manufacturers, but also gave people a free new medium that they could engage with and get their news from, that they were excited about. It was very similar to Twitter or X.

And I think that that idea of distributing not just content, but also form the pipes as well as what runs through the pipes, owning your own media platforms. The Trump team have several of them now. Trump has his own, which is increasing in value after the election, and Twitter, Musk has X.

I think that we, and always, Max, when I talk about the failings of the media, I am not talking about you or me or the whole media, independent media ecosystem that has provided us our community over all these many decades. And it’s exciting to know that there are new generations of independent media makers and movement media makers and a new alliance that I know that you’re part of, the Movement Media Alliance that’s thinking about how can we independents move more closely together, work more closely together, help one another survive better.

I assume my days on public television are numbered because I think public television is to be zeroed out of the budget, at least according to Project 2025. Not that anybody at public television covered that part of Project 2025, but hey, I read that chapter with care and concern. I think they mentioned it on page two.

But I do think that this media piece also, another thing that I’ve thought about a lot is we have monopoly media. And when I talk about extraction, the extraction takes resources from a place, attention, people, care, all of that, and concentrates it somewhere else. And if you think of what’s happened in our media, national networks have taken over where there used to be local media. And that local media that reflected back to you, perhaps, what was happening in your town, the little league scores, and the stores, and what’s happening in the church, and the food pantries, and anything would reflect back to you your actual reality. In most parts of this country, there is no such thing.

And I think that is another phenomenon, that it’s not just the addition of propaganda mechanisms, but the subtraction of the other media that made people feel that they lived in a community with other folks.

Marc Steiner:  I’d like to ask a quick question in the time we have here —

Maximillian Alvarez:  We’ve got a few minutes till our next segment, so take us out.

Marc Steiner:  OK. So when you have people like Elon Musk, J.D. Vance in positions of huge power, these are both very bright and shrewd men, and you have Project 2025, which they’re going to implement. We touched on it briefly, it was brought up, but it seems to me one of the biggest issues we’re going to face is people like that running the government and implementing Project 2025. I’m curious, what’s your analysis of that is, where do you think it’s going to take us, and what’s the struggle against it?

Rick, you want to jump in first?

Rick Perlstein:  Project 2025… One thing that is very important to understand about Project 2025 is how just thoroughly comprehensive it is. I tried to read through the whole thing, and it gets to the most molecular, granular levels of these agencies you’ve never even heard of.

Marc Steiner:  It does, I read it.

Rick Perlstein:  The contrast to power building on the left is we don’t have that kind of granularity about where the levers of power live. We say the right things, we have the right ideals. But one reason I personally preferred Elizabeth Warren over Bernie Sanders is she knew those millions of federal agencies and who worked there.

And just to kick a quick example, one of my friends running for office, running for governor, said he supported Elizabeth Warren because he told a story about how when he was running for governor, he said he was trying to create this certain financial reform, and in order to do it, he had to pass this law. And Elizabeth Warren said, no, you don’t have to pass this law, that’s already a federal law. You just need it enforced by this person and this place and dah, dah, dah, dah.

So I think that kind of granularity, that kind of seriousness about power, that kind of really unglamorous stuff is what Project 2025 accomplishes that there isn’t much of a parallel to on the left.

Laura Flanders:  Yeah, I would agree. I think that we talk about the writers being anti-government, but Project 2025 showed just how good they were at thinking about the role of government and what government can do.

Another aspect, of course, of that whole initiative is not just the policies on paper, but the people that were recruited to line up to be appointed into these offices in a way that enabled there to be a lot of scrutiny of those candidates long before any transition team comes into play. So unlike the last Trump administration, there won’t be the same kind of lag in populating government.

And I would just echo Rick: while they populate with loyalists, we need to look closely at local government and see where we can also shore up positions of influence at the local level. Because heck, we have got to look at any possible place in our entire government system where we can fortify resistance, fortify mechanisms that would act as at least a slowdown on this administration’s plans

Rick Perlstein:  [Inaudible] based decisions wherever we are that are going to have an effect on this resistance. And I wrote a column, Google it, “What Will You Do?” And it’s about the questions all of us will individually face under an authoritarian government, whether we’re in a government job, or we’re lawyers, or we’re working-class people, we might have to stand in the gap.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Well, we’re going to go to Wisconsin in a minute, but while we still have Rick Perlstein and Laura Flanders on with us, I want to ask you guys in a second to help center our viewers and listeners right now. Where does the fight go from here? And what is your message to folks right now who are feeling scared, anxious, uncertain about why they need to be part of that fight?

But I wanted to also underline the point about the importance of independent truth telling, principled, transparent, honest media. And if you support us here at The Real News, first of all, thank you. Secondly, please go support Laura Flanders & Friends if you don’t already. It is vital. The entire team there is great. They do incredible work week in, week out. And as you’ve seen here over the past 30 minutes, we desperately need Laura’s voice heard by as many folks as we can. Same goes for Rick. So if you are watching this, you support The Real News, please go support our friends at Laura Flanders & Friends. Please support the American Prospect, where Rick’s invaluable column is published every week.

So I wanted to put in a plug there for both of our guests and their incredible work, and I wanted to throw it back to you guys to have the final word here. Again, what would you say to folks out there watching and listening about where the fight goes from here, why they need to be part of it, and how we steel ourselves for what’s to come?

Laura Flanders:  I don’t know [laughs]. Well, I had a question for Rick if we had more time, and I guess we don’t, but I’ve been thinking how does this moment compare to the worst of the Nixon years, and is there any courage or any comfort to be had in the idea that we have seen bad times before? I’ll tell you —

Rick Perlstein:  Yeah. Nixon had a lot of this in mind for his second term, and that was all scotched by Watergate. And Watergate, in a lot of ways, was the political elite and institutions in this country having the courage to stand up to someone who really had authoritarian designs in mind.

So I’ll just say that we need all of us, whether we’re Democratic office holders or radical grassroots activists, to figure out some way to find every possible lever of accountability, and make it hard, make it hard. And that can just mean putting your body in front of an immigrant who’s going to be deported. Make it harder.

Laura Flanders:  [Crosstalk] immigrants. Just very briefly, Max, I will say, and first off, thanks for the pitch. If you absorb any independent media out there, fund it, send a contribution, whatever it is, support whatever avenue of information that you value, send them some money.

Secondly, I had a show. We recorded a show yesterday that will be aired tomorrow at 5:00, and all frontline activists, and one of them is Lene Yosef, who works with the Haitian Bridge Alliance, the only Haitian-American organization working with migrants on the border. She personally, with her organization, brought a citizens’ lawsuit against Trump and Vance over what they had done in Springfield, Ohio. And she knows for sure she’s on any enemies list that the administration’s going to have. She said, I’m Haitian, I’m indomitable. Don’t think for a minute that we are going to pause in our action.

And while I was there, white lady saying, oh my God, worst night ever. She’s like, eh, we’ve seen many worse nights. And the other guests that we had on the show too, who have spent years fighting segregation in North Carolina or genocide on the reservations, they all looked at me like, get over yourself, get down to work, get busy. I think art, culture, we’re going to need to really exercise our imagination and every possible tool of connection and place of connection that we have, into which we can invite the next generation, age-wise and every other kind of wise that will help us build a better day and connect us to one another. So save the places that you care about and invite new people into them.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Absolutely. Hell yeah. So that is the great Laura Flanders, host of Laura Flanders & Friends on PBS and the great Rick Perlstein author of numerous books, including Nixonland and Reaganland. And you can catch Rick’s column, the Infernal Triangle at the American Prospect.

Rick, Laura, thank you both so much for joining us at this critical moment. We need your voices now more than ever, and we appreciate you joining us and sharing them with our audience today. Take care of yourselves, and we’re sending love and solidarity to you guys from Baltimore. Good to see you both.

Laura Flanders:  Keep up the great work.

Rick Perlstein:  Yep.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Right back at you, sis. Thank you guys.

So we have another hour to go here. We really appreciate y’all sticking with us, and we really want to hear your questions, your comments, your responses to what’s being said here. As I said at the top of this livestream, this will not be the only chance that we have to address the questions that are on your mind. We want to take the questions that you’re asking us now in the live chat, in the comments of this video, and respond to them in future livestreams and segments. So we are going to stick with you, we’re going to stick with this. We’re in this for the long haul, and we’re going to keep doing what we can to get you the information and perspective that you need to act.

And today, in the second half of this livestream, we’re going to kick off the hour by going to one of the key battleground states that all eyes were on heading into Tuesday. It was a key pillar in the so-called blue wall in the Midwest, including Wisconsin, Michigan, both of which went for Trump.

And we actually had our intrepid reporters, my incredible colleagues, Marc’s incredible colleagues, Stephen Janis and Taya Graham on the ground in Milwaukee this week, where they also were reporting from during the RNC earlier in the summer. 

They’ve had a hell of a week. And we want to get an on the ground update from them on what they’ve been seeing, hearing, feeling there on the ground in Wisconsin as folks went to the polls and as the results started coming in. We are hoping to also be joined by John Nichols, national affairs correspondent at The Nation to help us also get some perspective on what Wisconsin can tell us about the larger political realignment taking place in this country.

But for now, I want to bring in my amazing colleagues Stephen Janis and Taya Graham. Guys, thank you so much for, first of all, all the incredible work that you’ve been doing. The entire team here is so proud of you and so grateful —

Stephen Janis:  Thank you.

Maximillian Alvarez:  …For your hustle and for everything that you’ve done to execute our mission. So I wanted to start there. I know you guys are tired, you’ve had a hell of a week [Janis and Graham laugh]. So why don’t we start there? A, how you doing, and B, can you give us a sense of what this has all looked like from your vantage point reporting there on the ground in Wisconsin from Monday to now?

Stephen Janis:  Yep. It’s interesting because Taya and I always say when we’ve reported on the ground for presidential elections since 2016 for The Real News, and there’s always moments that we have where we encounter someone or something that gives us a cue. And I would say that this particular, we were on the ground out going to polls like we always do, and we went to Centennial, what was it…?

Taya Graham:  Centennial Hall? Yeah, Centennial Hall. It was for wards 183, 184, and 185.

Stephen Janis:  Yeah, Centennial Hall. But basically it serves Marquette and University of Milwaukee.

And we interviewed several people and there were a couple of things that came to mind. First of all, there was a young woman who we thought was, you presume would be talking about reproductive rights or whatever, who said, and she’s like, I voted for Trump. And Taya and I both looked at each other and we’re like, wow, that does not bode well that we’re in downtown Milwaukee. And then another young man, who was a student as well, voted for Trump.

But what was interesting about it, relating back to our previous guests, was the information ecosystem from which they made this decision seemed so murky, and so really not within the realm of how policy actually works. And it harkened back, for me, to what we had talked about right after the debate, Kamala Harris, where she soundly defeated Donald Trump. And we asked the question, would it matter?

And I was just reading an article today in The New York Times about a Republican strategist who was stunned that, after that horrible debate performance by Donald Trump, that Kamala Harris didn’t rise up much in the polls.

And these students exemplify that because they’re getting their information from places, I think, that don’t really have a concrete rendering of the vagaries of policy. And in this case, I think, Taya, you wanted to talk a little bit about the young man.

Taya Graham:  If I may.

Stephen Janis:  Talk about the young man that was really interesting, because you challenged him. And just talk about that.

Taya Graham:  So I don’t think people realize how much the culture war that has been promulgated by the Republican Party has been incredibly effective. So this young man we spoke to was actually from California. He’s an Asian American. And he essentially said, and in not so many words, that he didn’t want his media to be woke.

And what he cited was J.R.R. Tolkien’s Rings of Power on Amazon Prime. He cited that he did not want, I guess, present-dayism put into his fantasy. And I said to him, quite pointedly, I said, so you didn’t like the Black lady dwarf is what you’re saying [Steiner laughs]? And he smiled, and he looked down, and he said, well that, and the LGBTQ ideology that I found in the art as well.

And I did challenge him a little bit. I said, well, isn’t art supposed to reflect the zeitgeist of the age? Isn’t that the point of any form of art, whether it’s a book being adapted, that it’s supposed to reflect the culture of the time? And he said, no, I just want to escape when I watch whatever creative form that he’s interested in. So I was somewhat surprised by that.

So essentially he’s saying, I’m rejecting woke ideology, and that is why I’m voting for Trump.

Stephen Janis:  The thing is, what you saw in some of the voters was the Democrats have a very professional rollout, talking points, and somewhat, I think, seemingly in this media ecosystem, an inauthentic approach. As opposed to Trump who permeates and gets through that morass of social media because he seems to them — And I’m saying to them — To be a more authentic alternative.

That’s the only thing I can figure, because their grasp of the policy aspects of both the Democratic administration and what really is going to happen. This young woman was like, well, Trump improved abortion rights because he sent it to the states.

Taya Graham:  Exactly.

Stephen Janis:  She said that to us. And Taya and I are looking at each other…

Taya Graham:  A little puzzled, little puzzled.

Stephen Janis:  Taya, you can talk a little bit more about that. But I think that, just to emphasize that this is a social media tumble world they’re in, and the Democrats are coming forward with a very professional campaign, but maybe that doesn’t work.

Taya Graham:  Right. The one thing that I can tell for certain from all the different people that we spoke to at the polls is that the Democrats did not do their job communicating to the public effectively. And people can discuss for the next four years how Trump was so effective, whether it’s that he’s the perfect man for the social media ecosystem that we have, that he’s able to push through in a way that, as Stephen said, granular policy analysis simply dies on the vine.

But these young people, I would say — And I don’t mean to say this to be rude to the Trump voters in any way — [When] we went to the Republican National Convention, and also the people at the polls, when I spoke to delegates at the Republican National Convention, they could not cite specific policies. It was based on their feelings about Donald Trump as a leader.

And that is exactly what that young woman said. She could not name a single policy from his previous administration that she liked, but she just felt that he felt stronger as a candidate. And so it’s an emotional connection. And for whatever reason, Democrats have not been effective at making that sort of connection with the public.

Maximillian Alvarez:  I think that’s a really critical point. The emotional economy of vibes is playing a huge role in shaping voter attitudes and perceptions of the reality that they’re living in.

I want to return to that point for sure in a minute, but I’m excited to welcome on our other guest for this segment, the great John Nichols, who is national affairs correspondent of The Nation, has been writing on and analyzing Wisconsin and its place in the political terrain for many years. We’ve had him on Marc’s show. He is a brilliant, brilliant mind, and we’re so grateful to have him on to help us unpack this.

John, are you there with us?

John Nichols:  I think I am. I can see folks.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Beautiful. Good to see you, man.

Marc Steiner:  We can see you [laughs]!

John Nichols:  It’s a pleasure.

Marc Steiner:  John. How are you? Good to see you.

John Nichols:  Good to see you, my friend.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Thank you so much for joining us, man. We know you don’t have much time. We know you’re working your butt off right now —

John Nichols:  Amazing, we’re still trying to figure this one out.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Yeah. So while we’ve got you, I want to give our audience access to your rich perspective here, ’cause we need it right now. And there is a lot to be unpacked about the current results in Wisconsin that I want to ask you to try to help our viewers and listeners understand what they’re seeing and where it came from, but to also offer us some larger historical perspective here.

I was watching on MSNBC, they were showing the map from 2008 to 2024. It’s basically mirror images of each other in terms of, especially in the rural counties across Wisconsin that [are] now deep red when they were blue not so long ago. And this, of course, is taking place in a longer political trajectory in a state that, in many ways, is the heart of modern progressivism.

So I wanted to ask if you could, A, help us unpack what we are seeing now in Wisconsin, what is happening in Wisconsin and what that tells us about the national scene right now, and how the heck we got here. What can Wisconsin tell us about how we got here?

John Nichols:  Well, that’s a great way to frame the question, frankly, because Wisconsin, of course, we begin with the fact that it’s the ultimate battleground state, more of a battleground state than any other in the country. Now, in the last seven presidential elections, the last seven presidential elections, five of them have been decided by under 35,000 votes, four of ’em by under 25,000 votes. So you can’t find another state in the country that has that pattern of deep divide. This is a state that has a Democratic senator and a Republican senator. It’s a state that had a Republican governor, now it has a Democratic governor. It is constant. Out of this election, we just had a result that made our state legislature, our state Senate, almost exactly tied.

And so in that context, obviously, small movements in one direction or another mean a lot. And you are basically right to focus on rural, and that’s a place where progressivism was, in Wisconsin, at its strongest at one time. It was a combination of Milwaukee socialists and rural populist farmers. It was a very effective coalition.

And interestingly enough, it helped. The Milwaukee Socialists faded and so did some of the progressive tradition, but still, you had a state that voted Democratic in 1988, 1992, 1996, 2000, 2004, 2008, and 2012, this whole pattern.

And then Trump comes along and he cracks into that. He doesn’t win by much in 2016 — And he didn’t win by much this time, 20,000, 30,000 votes is what you’re talking about. That still makes Wisconsin, and when all is said and done, Wisconsin will end up being closer than most of the battleground states.

Here’s the fascinating thing about Wisconsin, though: Tammy Baldwin, US Senator, who’s clearly to the left of Kamala Harris on a number of issues, she won. She pulled it off. And just as Trump won Wisconsin, it looks like we had roughly 30,000 votes, Baldwin won by roughly 30,000 votes. So there’s a space there.

But I think you have to be careful to assume that there were Trump people voting for Baldwin. There was a drop off. There’s, I think, a portion of Trump voters who just vote for Trump and don’t even vote for the rest of the Republican ticket. That’s something to take into the mix. But there were some folks who actually did cast a Trump-Baldwin vote. It seems bizarre to us in many ways because that doesn’t compute. Tammy Baldwin, an out lesbian who supports Medicare, has supported Medicare for all, who has been very progressive, not always, and not as good as I might want on some issues, but pretty solid record winning in a state where Trump’s winning.

How does that happen? What’s going on there? Why do you have this? Well, the answer, and we saw a little bit in Michigan with Slotkin winning the Senate seat narrowly over there. The answer is that Tammy Baldwin did something that the national Democratic ticket didn’t do, and that is she wedded her campaign to trade unionism, to the working class, to the labor movement.

And this morning, not long before I joined you today, I was at an event where she formally declared victory. She didn’t do it at a downtown hotel like Democrats always do, or almost always do. She didn’t do it in an office, some office someplace, or even, frankly, at her alma mater or the University of Wisconsin campus. She did it at a union hall on the edge of town. And the place was packed with union members wearing their shirts, steamfitters, electricians, Teamsters, all sorts of other folks. And when she walked in the room, there was this epic cheering.

And that’s, frankly, what Democrats need to have. They need to have union members cheering them on. They need to have an excitement about their candidates. Just as, I guess, as an example, the Christian right gets very excited when a Republican walks in the room.

And one of the things that Baldwin did in Wisconsin — This is the last I’ll say on this because I want to hear more of your questions, of course, but one of the things that Baldwin did in Wisconsin was a wholly different set of ads. You wouldn’t have recognized them as compared to the Democratic Party in a lot of other places.

Her ads, one set of her ads featured Teamsters who were sitting, one after another, sitting in a chair talking about when they lost their pensions and when they were in very dire straits: the plant had closed, the pensions taken away, and each Teamster after another talked about an aspect of the story. It’s a very short ad, but they’re saying, when we lost our pension, we thought we were going to lose everything. And a couple sitting there saying, we thought we’re going to lose our house. These are real working-class people talking about a profound issue.

And then toward the end of it, one of ’em says, and so we called Tammy Baldwin and she went to work for us. And then — I’m paraphrasing here, but the close of it was, if you’re in trouble, if you’re having a hard time as a worker, you need Tammy Baldwin on your side. That is a kind of classic outreach to working-class, multiracial, multiethnic voting class.

And she had other ads with people working in shipyards, people working on farms. And so she ran a campaign that reached out to the working class, and it paid off. She won. Other good Democrats didn’t. That’s something to pay attention to.

Marc Steiner:  I’ll extrapolate that a bit more. When I think about Wisconsin. Wisconsin’s always been, people look at it as a progressive state, but it’s always been a deeply divided state as well, politically. George Wallace did well there, Joe McCarthy bloomed out there. And so I wonder, what you just said about Tammy Baldwin, what does that say strategically to you about what progressive leaders in this country have to do to build a majority and to take the fight to the working class and bring people together? What is the Wisconsin lesson?

John Nichols:  Well, the Wisconsin lesson is a pretty simple one. For about 150 years, Wisconsin hasn’t liked elites, hasn’t liked people in New York or Washington or LA or other places that tend to tell ’em what’s going on. And there’s a reason for that. Wisconsin was historically a farm state, and the farm products that they produced had to be shipped by train. The railroads charged extreme rates, and that was very damaging to people.

And so they developed this sensibility: that which we do not control is probably going to harm us. And it’s one of the reasons why historically Wisconsin was a more anti-war state. Wisconsin tends to think wars came from Washington.

Wisconsin was a state that was historically a very strong union state, very strong on a lot of different issues, and also very anticorporate in a lot of ways, and very antimonopoly, et cetera, et cetera.

Our politics has become so muddled in recent decades that I think most people don’t necessarily see the Democratic Party as an anticorporate, antimonopoly party. So if you’re going to get those votes, you have to remind people of that, or there’s a real chance that they’re going to vote for somebody else who sounds like they’re attacking elites. That’s how you ended up with a Robert M. La Follette, the great progressive winning, his son Robert M. La Follette Jr. winning a Senate seat, which ultimately went to Joe McCarthy.

Now, you and I don’t get very excited about Joe McCarthy. We don’t like where Joe McCarthy was coming from, but in his time, he was seen by somebody who was attacking a certain set of elites. And that’s the thing to understand. That even came in through Russ Feingold more recently as a US Senator from Wisconsin losing his seat to Ron Johnson. All of this is kind of a muddled politics. You have to cut your way through it.

And what Baldwin did was her way through it, she said, hey, by the way, I am the candidate of unions and of working class people. I don’t just tell you that in a speech or something. I don’t put ’em on my ads. I’m going to actually use them talking to the people of this state. It didn’t mean that she deemphasized other issues, her strong support of abortion rights. She’s arguably the leading supporter of abortion rights in the Senate. Didn’t mean that she played down her stances on a host of issues, but she turned up volume on these working class issues, and it paid off.

I think you saw a little bit in Michigan with Slotkin in her Senate race as well, but you didn’t see it in the presidential race. And I think that’s a subtlety of this thing. Kamala Harris had extremely strong union support, and unions went to the mat for her and really worked hard all over the country. Even when the Teamsters didn’t endorse her, Teamsters regional and local councils jumped in to back her and gave her a tremendous amount of support. And so they did a lot of internal work.

In fact, fascinatingly enough, the exit polling shows that one of the few demographics that didn’t decline for the Democrats in this cycle was union members. So the unions did great work with their members. The problem is that the Harris campaign — Which did many things right, I’m not here to just purely complain about the Harris campaign — But they did not put that broader emphasis on working class issues as central to their campaign. And so as a result in the nonunion working class, they experienced a lot of loss. And again, that multiracial, multiethnic challenge that they faced.

Here’s the simple thing I would offer, yes, for Wisconsin lesson itself, maybe to some extent upper Midwest, and that is this: people need to clearly know where you’re at, and you need to remind ’em. You can’t assume people remember it from past elections or things like that. Our friends here were just talking about the social media landscape and all these other ways that we get our information now. It’s bifurcated. It’s not the same daily newspaper or local radio station. It’s all sorts of sources. And in that cacophony, you lose sight sometimes of core messages.

What struck me is that Kamala Harris — Who, again, I thought did many things right, but why didn’t she, in every single speech, say, we are going to raise the minimum wage to a living wage? Why wasn’t that part of every speech? Why wasn’t it part of every speech to say that Donald Trump renegotiated NAFTA and made it worse, actually undermined the auto parts industry, and all sorts of industries, and call it Trump’s NAFTA. Why not say that? Why appear everywhere with Liz Cheney, but almost never with Bernie Sanders, and only rarely with Shawn Fain?

The equation, it’s so easy to figure this out, and it always frustrates me that the Democratic Party has such a struggle to get to it at the national level. Again, some people like Baldwin and Slotkin are figuring it out.

But why not? When you’re in that situation, why not take the step, deliver the message, appear with the people that are going to be useful to you politically? This isn’t just moral politics, although I think being pro-union is a morally good stance. This is also practical politics.

And the fascinating thing about it is that I looked at the data, all those places that Kamala Harris went with Liz Cheney, all that outreach to conservatives, the percentage of conservatives voting for Kamala Harris in 2024 was down from the percentage that voted for Joe Biden in 2020. They didn’t get anybody over. Nothing happened there. In the suburban areas that they went to where they actually had these sitdowns with Liz Cheney. They didn’t move numbers. Things didn’t get better for them there. And so it was wasted energy that could have been spent going to, not just physically, but messaging wise, to working-class people of all races and in all communities.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Yeah, man, that’s making my blood boil, man [Alvarez and Nichols laugh]. That’s a powerful analysis though. No, really helpful and vital information. And I do have a follow-up question if we got time. We only got brother John Nichols for a few more minutes. I did want to give my colleagues Stephen, Janis and Taya Graham, the chance, if you guys are still with us, since you guys have been reporting there in Milwaukee, if you guys had a question for John based on what you’ve been seeing there on the ground, I did want to prioritize that, but no pressure if you don’t.

Taya Graham:  Well, first off, I just want to say I’m so glad that he mentioned Sen. Tammy Baldwin. We were actually at a Harris-Walz rally. What was the name of that event center? Was that, was that the State Fairgrounds?

Stephen Janis:  Expo? State Expo?

Taya Graham:  It was at the state Expo,

Stephen Janis:  Yep.

Taya Graham:  And we were there, and there was so much excitement when she came onto the stage. People love her here, and I feel like I wish I could be a fly on the wall as the Democratic Party is doing the autopsy right now.

Because I think there’s a lesson, and perhaps you can confirm this for me, that they did not learn either from watching Sen. Baldwin or from seeing how much Sen. Sanders was actually able to generate enthusiasm, which is when the Democrats, as they normally do when they start doing a national campaign, they start moving towards the middle thinking that they’re going to bring people over — Instead of, perhaps, taking a different alternative of leaning into being authentic, and just leaning left, just going completely into progressive policies, completely embracing unions. And instead of worrying about being characterized as leftists or Marxists, or what have you, just so you know what, we’re going to be progressive, we’re going to stop trying to play the middle. Because I think they didn’t learn anything from Sen. Sanders’s campaign, or Sen. Baldwin’s.

John Nichols:  I think it’s a brilliant question, and you’re spot on. Bernie Sanders came to Madison about eight days before the election, Monday the week out. And they had about a couple hours, basically, to organize the event. It was in one of the main theaters on State Street in downtown Madison. Big, big cavernous theater.

It was packed. I walked over to where the event was, there was a line out the door, around the block because Bernie Sanders was coming. He had AOC with him as well. They got up there, delivered a pure progressive message, and people were on their feet, excited, engaged, and they talked a lot about these issues that we’re talking about.

But there’s a deeper thing in your question that I think is really vital, and that is leaning into a progressive stance. I think Democrats often think that makes ’em look weak or something. That somehow, oh, you’re off in this place, or whatever. It’s the exact opposite. As Sanders has proven, when you come out as a genuine progressive and you’re proud of it and you speak about it strongly, people come to you. And I think that’s even people who aren’t ideologically necessarily with you, but they’re like, wow, that’s somebody who really means it.

And I can give you an example on an issue that we haven’t talked about, but I think it’s vital here, or at least relevant, and that’s Gaza. Joe Biden’s stance on Gaza is that he would like what’s happening there to stop. He officially says, oh, we want the killing to stop. We want the horrors to end. He says that as the president of the United States of America, one of the most powerful countries in the world and a very close ally of Israel.

And does that project strength? No, I think it projects weakness. I think it says, on this fundamental issue that tens of millions of Americans care about, you’re not willing to step up. You’re not going to use the power of your office to take a stand. And I think the same thing happened to Harris on that, such a muddled position on Gaza. So little messaging that, I think, could have reached a ton of people.

And then you look around the country, you say, well, it’s a drop off in votes, hm, obviously, among many Arab Americans, Muslim Americans, but also on campuses, where students were so passionately concerned about these issues.

And I guess what I would tell you is that, on a host of issues, having a strong position makes people who don’t even necessarily agree with you say, wow, that person believes in things. I know that they get to Congress, they get to a position of power, they’re going to fight for me. And that is an intangible… In fact, you two were talking about just a second ago where you were talking about these kind of personality things and all the media influences and things like that. Well, in that cacophony, if you’re a strong voice, it has meaning. It gets heard.

And again, I think that takes us back to what we’re talking about with Baldwin a little bit on these working class, on these union issues. She jumped right in. She stood there strongly and said, this is who I am. She’s running against a very wealthy guy from California, as you know from watching the state so well. It was perfect. It’s a perfect juxtaposition.

And so what I would say for the Democratic Party as regards our very good question there that led us into this whole discussion is the Democratic Party, I think, needs to have a radical rethink, a deep, deep rethink about this. Because this campaign should not have ended this way at the presidential level, and frankly, even at the congressional level, it just shouldn’t have ended where it did. Something about that doesn’t suggest strength on Trump’s part, in my view — It suggests weakness on the Democratic Party’s part.

If that is the case, then the most important thing, I would say, about this rethink is please don’t say you want to rebuild the Democratic Party. Because the fact of the matter is, we have had this cycle on and off for decades now where the party wins and you say, oh, it’s perfect, and then it loses, and you say, well, we’ve got to rebuild stuff. But you keep going back to some of the models of the past. Politics has evolved. The Republican Party is a very different party than the one they ran against in the past. And the messaging, the outreach to the Republican Party now, in many cases, aimed at working-class voters, at very frustrated, angry folks who have, in many cases, reasons to be angry at the system.

If that’s what you’re up against, don’t rebuild; build something new. Build a political party that is multiracial, multiethnic, that respects people where they’re coming from, but also respects the fact that they’re struggling economically, that in this capitalist system, it just doesn’t work very well for them. And speak to that in a way that is of the moment and looking to the future. Talk about these issues we’re talking about, but, finally, and perhaps most importantly, talk about the issues that are never discussed.

Do you want to know what builds anxiety in America? There’s a lot of stuff. Inflation builds anxiety. No question of that. The inability to buy a house, all sorts of economic issues. For women, the threat to their bodily autonomy, the assault on abortion rights, for LGBTQ people, who were literally targeted in advertising throughout this campaign all over this country. All of that builds anxiety.

You know what else builds anxiety? AI, artificial intelligence, the rise of machine learning. People’s lives are being radically transformed on a daily basis. How we communicate, how we work, how we study. You talk to a university professor, they’ll tell you everything is different in the classroom because everybody’s using ChatGPT and all this stuff like that. That was never brought up in this campaign. A Democratic Party that brought up how technology is changing our lives. It is a very future-oriented party, but also one that understands the anxiety of working-class people in this country.

So again, If we’ve got to be stuck with a two-party system, let’s have a new Democratic Party that actually takes in all the stuff that you are talking about, that you are, that all these people are talking about, and gets us to a point where, ideally, ideally, the counter to a cruel and angry, and, I think, in many cases, awful Republican message — One that is very dark and it has nothing to do with the history of the Republican Party or anything like that, but that it’s one that’s really aimed at dividing people, aimed at really building out that anxiety. The counter to that is a party that’s capable of looking at the future, explaining it, and offering a better route forward.

Marc Steiner:  Very well put, John.

Maximillian Alvarez:  I wish I could keep this segment with everyone here going for another half hour, but I know brother John Nichols has a deadline to meet.

John Nichols:  I’m actually writing about some of the things we’re talking about [laughs].

Maximillian Alvarez:  Well, let me help out. That’s good. We can’t wait to read it. Everyone who’s watching this needs to go and read it. Stephen and Taya, I’m going to ask you guys if you can hang on for just a little bit. And brother John, I will say thank you and goodbye here. If you’re able to hold on for 30 seconds, cool. If not, we thank you so much. But I just wanted to add there, because I’m worried that folks are taking, once again, the wrong sort of lessons from the political map here, especially as it pertains to the rural and urban divide in places like Wisconsin.

John Nichols:  Let me give you 30 seconds on that.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Please, please. What are the anxieties in rural Wisconsin? We were reporting there on the CAFOs, on climate affecting their crops. For folks who are just thinking that people in rural America, they’re all driven by racism and uneducation and whatnot, what are the anxieties that folks there’re feeling too?

John Nichols:  Well, the town I was born in had 970 people when I was born, and so I grew up in the most rural places — And that was actually one of the biggest communities members of my family had ever lived in. They route back to places with 300 people and 200, and farms. And so that’s where I come from.

And one of the things that I always start with is telling people that rural America is multiracial, multiethnic, and far more diverse than I think our national media even begins to understand. If you look at the main streets in rural towns, they’re being revitalized, particularly by Latino immigrants, but also by Asian American immigrants. There are real amazing things happening. There are now small towns in Wisconsin that are majority immigrant families, because people have come, they have revitalized those towns, they’ve rebuilt those towns. It’s an amazing thing.

Now, it doesn’t mean that rural areas aren’t predominantly white in many states, but I always remind people that roughly a quarter of Black Americans live in rural counties, mostly in the South, but a substantial population that the boom areas for, obviously, the Latino population, but also for Asian American population is rural areas because they’re moving there, they’re working there, they’re creating things.

And so if we understand it as that, first off, we have to recognize rural America isn’t what our media tells us it is. It’s much more, it has a lot of diversity, a lot of distinction within it. The other thing that I always emphasize to people is this: that those blue and red maps are useless. They’re a nightmare because they don’t tell you the actual percentages in those counties. Many of those counties that you look at that are red on the map are 45% blue, right? They’ve got fights within ’em, real battles.

And what in Wisconsin, Tammy Baldwin would not have been re-elected if it wasn’t for rural Democrats. She got a great vote out of Madison, a very liberal town, great vote out of Milwaukee, a multiracial, multiethnic town. She got great votes in these places, but she also held her own in the rural areas. She was endorsed for re-election by the Farm Bureau. That’s wild. But it was there because she’s been good on farm issues.

What that means, what that translates to is that, for the Democratic Party, which has been such a mess on so many issues for so long, is that they need to get better on rural. They need to talk to these folks. There are rural Democrats out there doing the work. They’re opening their headquarters, they’re knocking on doors. I can take you to the places and show you people that are putting so much effort and energy into this, but they do need messaging from the national level.

And one of the things I would tell you is that the Democratic Party will do dramatically better in rural areas if Democratic nominees for president simply include three lines in their speeches: Not another rural post office will close if we are elected; not another rural school will close if we are elected; and not another rural hospital will close if we are elected.

Go out and say just those three lines in a speech, and you stick to it, you watch some of those numbers shift. The reason Trump and Republicans do well in rural areas is often because people don’t think there’s a big difference between the two parties, and then they default to the anger of the division.

But if you gave ’em a real alternative, I think we open up a whole new avenue for politics. That does not deny the reality of ugly politics and people who do vote on the basis of race and, typically, toward folks — That happens. I know that there’s no denying that, but what I’m saying is one of the counters to that is an outreach that actually says to rural people, we see you. We hear you. We want to respond to your actual problems, not to try and make you hate somebody else or not to try and make you see somebody else as a problem. There’s space there. There’s so much space there.

And even though we’re staying longer than usual, I love talking about these rural politics issues because it’s, frankly, one of the spaces where both parties have so much to learn because both parties tend to treat rural folks as an afterthought that they just throw slogans — Good slogans are [inaudible] rather than actually going out and talking to the people. So I really thank you for giving me a chance to say that.

Marc Steiner:  I’m glad you did.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Thank you so much. John Nichols, the great John Nichols national affairs correspondent at The Nation. We can’t wait to read your piece. We depend on your work. So please, yeah, keep doing it, brother, and let’s have you back on very soon.

John Nichols:  I appreciate it. And hey, I really appreciate what you folks do, and I love the reporting that you folks have been doing in Wisconsin. Some people come here and they just come for a minute and they pop in on the tarmac of the airport. You’ve got some reporters that have embedded themselves, and that’s a really big, big deal. It makes the reporting so much better. So thank you for treating Wisconsin and America seriously.

Marc Steiner:  Great to see you, John.

John Nichols:  Thank you.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Well, speaking of those incredible reporters, Stephen Janis and Taya Graham, do we still got you guys over there in Milwaukee? We may have lost Stephen and Taya —

Stephen Janis:  — Hear, can you hear us? [Crosstalk] .

Maximillian Alvarez:  Of course they’re there. They’re always there. Stephen and Taya are always there [Steiner laughs]. That’s what you get with these incredible folks on the Police Accountability Report and elsewhere. I wanted to A, bring you back in, ask if you guys had any additional thoughts after what John just said about Wisconsin, but also we are going to be wrapping up this livestream by bringing on our final guest, the great Bill Gallegos of the Mexico Solidarity Project.

Bill’s been on Marc’s show recently. We’ve been working with him on some really great historical segments. Bill also has years of experience in racial justice, Latino justice organizing, immigrant justice organizing, climate justice organizing.

And so one of the things we wanted to talk to Bill about is helping to unpack the narratives that are emerging about changing voter trends, specifically in Latino populations, Latino men being one of the current groups that are being talked about the most as having swung more for Trump.

But this is also an area of reporting that you guys have been really committed to and have done great work in recent months, where Taya has been out there going and talking to Black and Brown Republicans about how they are thinking about the election and voting for Trump. So I wanted to include that as a way to bring Bill in here and continue the conversation that we’re having.

So I’m going to toss it to you guys here. And yeah, we’ll have Bill Gallegos on the other side to hop in as well.

Taya Graham:  Well, I would be happy to speak on the Black conservatives that I spoke with. I spoke to Tia Best, who is national engagement director for Moms of Liberty. I spoke to, I think dozens, literally dozens of Black Republicans at the Republican National Convention the last time we were here in Wisconsin. That was so kind, to hear Mr. Nichols give our work such a compliment. That was a huge boost.

But back to the Black conservatives, something I thought was interesting is that they said Black people are naturally socially conservative. So this shift to the Republican Party should be expected. But I’d like to say that the loss of Black male voters was not that huge. I think depending on what state you’re looking at, 74%, up to 80%, of Black men voted for Harris. In any other ethnic group that would be considered a landslide. There was a slight peel off of Black male voters and male Latino voters towards Trump.

But in general, Black voters held for Harris and held for the Democratic Party, whereas the Democratic Party was hemorrhaging votes from youth and, actually, so many different minority coalitions that, in theory, should be under the tent of the Democrats.

But the one talking point I kept hearing from Black conservatives is that we’re socially conservative. Black folks are church folks. It’s natural; The Democratic Party is moving away from us, we didn’t move away from them. And that is what I’ve received from Black conservatives.

Maximillian Alvarez:  So I want to bring in Brother Bill Gallegos here as well, because this is an issue that we’ve been talking about with him and that he’s been talking about and trying to get folks to pay attention to in the many months leading up to this election.

So Bill, do we have Bill Gallegs of the Mexico Solidarity Project with us?

Bill Gallegos:  I am here, and I’m glad to be here, and I’m really glad to be here with the folks in Wisconsin, from John with you all, and I really appreciate it.

I got to say my take is probably somewhat different than what we’ve been hearing so far. I think race was at the center of this campaign, and the only really significant increase in the electoral voting patterns was from white folks, and they overwhelmingly went for Trump.

And his campaign didn’t start a year ago. This has been his consistent message since he started, but especially since he lost the election in 2020. There’s been a consistent message that centered race, using immigrants as the focal point for it. But I think it was clearly aimed at dealing with this feeling that white privilege is at risk, the particular role of white people in controlling society. And we know it’s the 1%, but I think for a lot of white folks, this idea, Trump pretty much said, I will protect white suburban women from these immigrants coming into your neighborhoods and ruining not only the physical threat, destroying your property values.

So I am very concerned that this will get lost in the postmortem that we’re doing on the elections. I know I just saw something from Bernie where he said, the problem is that we focused on identity politics instead of class politics, as if if you focus on the attack on Black and Brown voting rights, that’s not a class issue. That’s a huge class issue. And the working class is not just white folks. It is a multiracial, working-class, majority women, and some of the most dynamic sectors are those in the Black, Brown, Filipino communities.

So I really feel like we should be very critical of how the Democrats ran this campaign. I’m particularly critical of for years and years and years and years, they have been told, do not take Latinos for granted. Forget the Cubans. I mean, I don’t care what you do, they’re going to go with the Republicans, and we know the historical roots of that. But for the Central American community, the Dominican community, the Puerto Rican community and the Chicano community, that is not the case, and has been solidly Democratic, even in the last elections in 2020 and 2022 — 70% to 75% of Latinos voting [for them]. Most political parties in the world would kill for those numbers.

They shifted this time, and we should look at that. But I think we really, really need to understand, just given the history of this country as a racial capitalism, how deeply embedded that is not just in the politics, but in the psyche, the political psyche of this country.

And if we run from it, I think what somebody said is that Kamala tried to run and hide on immigration. That was the exact wrong thing to do. All that did was give a much more open space to the racist messaging that was consistent from the Republican Party, and has been consistent for years, starting with the Tea Party. When the Tea Party came out, it wasn’t just against Obamacare. That was one of the first organized organizations outside of one of those anti-immigration rights groups that started talking about anchor babies and making that a part of their campaign and putting it into the Republican program.

So I think we have to really take on this issue, not identity politics versus class politics. We have to see the connection here. And for example, when John is talking about the rural areas, farmers, well, nobody’s caught more hell than Black and Brown farmers — They’re barely holding onto the land that they’ve got.

All those years when the Department of Agriculture was giving loans to white farmers so they could hold onto their land and not giving it to Black farmers, not giving it to Chicano farmers. And then when the Biden administration tried to send in some reparation money — That’s effectively what it was — For Black farmers, the Republicans killed it.

So yeah, I want to talk about rural areas. I mean, my family were farmers in New Mexico and Colorado. And the folks are trying to hold on desperately trying to hold onto that land there, as well as Black farmers in the South. So yes, we have to help our white farming brothers and sisters understand why they have to be the hardest fighters for Black folks to get the money that they’re entitled to continue their farming and make it generational for Chicano farmers to hold onto their land that Monsanto’s trying to grab up there in Northern New Mexico.

So I come at it a little bit differently, I think, than we’ve been hearing, and I think we have to be careful about this thing that advancing class dynamics somehow doesn’t include issues like voting rights and gerrymandering and women’s reproductive rights. Those are class issues. Those aren’t elite issues. Those are class issues. The women that are going to be dying from these back alley abortions are not going to be rich white women. It’s going to be poor working-class white women, and it’s going to be mostly women of color.

So I think, as we’re all sorting this out — And it’s too early to make any hard and fast conclusions, but there are some things that we do know: that the Republican Party has become a party of apartheid, of white minority rule. They pretty much say it; and Christian nationalism. And that’s rooted in mainly the white, Evangelical churches. I’m not discounting the impact of Latino Evangelical churches, I think they did have an impact in this election, but I think we need to really get a hold of that.

The second thing is I think we really need to understand that we’re not talking about a qualitative shift in political conditions now, I mean a quantitative shift, there’s a qualitative shift in political conditions. When they’re talking about replacing 40,000 or 50,000 federal workers in all federal departments, that’s huge. That is a vastly different attitude than we’re talking about if there was a Democratic administration. And we have to be ready — Talking about a labor movement and a working class movement — Ready to defend those workers, because we can’t just roll over and say, well, Trump’s going to bring in all these folks that Project 2025 talked about. So we have to be ready to defend those workers in the Interior Department, the Food and Drug Administration, the EPA. We have to be ready to do that.

We know that the right wing has been wanting to target the labor movement, and they feel the most vulnerable sector is the public sector. So when they talk about eliminating the Department of Education, that’s only a piece of the puzzle. What they really want to do is just destroy the power of teachers unions. They saw the strikes in Arkansas and Oklahoma and California and every other damn place, and they want to crush that. And they make it very clear. It’s very clear that’s a big part of their agenda.

So when we talk about class issues, I think that’s a key part of it. But we also need to understand that we are facing now a qualitatively different set of conditions when Trump talks about an ethnic cleansing campaign, yet that’s different than even the deporter-in-chief Obama or some of the shit that Biden has done. This is something qualitatively different, a massive ethnic cleansing campaign that, even if we take the lower estimate of 15 million undocumented immigrants and we make a low estimate of maybe two or three of their family members will be impacted, that’s 40 million people directly impacted. That will have an impact on small business infrastructure in these poor Black and Brown communities; on unions, where the most dynamic sector of the union movement has been among immigrants, Latino women especially; it will have an impact on social organizations. It will have an impact.

The impact would just be enormous. And Trump understands this, which is why he is saying it will be a military campaign. This is not just sending in the border patrol with a few trucks and vans. They’re talking about it because that’s the only way you could do it.

And we have to understand that the connection internationally is they’re talking about setting up a series of concentration camps along the border because the overwhelming majority of these people will be Mexicano. What kind of pressure are they going to put on this new left-wing government in Mexico, on the Sheinbaum administration, to take these millions and millions of working people? So we have to be ready to stand with our brothers and sisters in Mexico who will want to support their government in standing up to the United States.

And it’s not just a political question because the United States has enormous political leverage over Mexico’s economy, enormous. When they make threats about we’re just going to wreck your economy, we have to take that seriously.

But this is going to now become this question of immigration and this ethnic cleansing. It’s already an international question. Are they really going to ship 100,000 people back to Haiti? Are we going to sit and watch and let that happen? Where’s the labor movement? Yes, Shawn Fain, I agree with you, in 2028, we should all go out on strike. But now, right now, the labor movement needs to come out and stand for its immigrant brother and sister workers. We have to say that not a single ICE agent will ever get into our schools. We have to create sanctuary cities everywhere that we can.

In terms of the media, I’m worried about you all. I know they want to go after public television and public radio, that’s for sure. That scares me. But they hate the Pacific Radio Network. You can be sure about that. They hate The Real News Network. Y’all are vulnerable — Unless we build a strong and broad resistance movement. The few voices that we had, I know they got my address. Max, I’m guessing they got yours. They know where to find us. We haven’t been hiding, and this is going to become very vulnerable. I’m worried.

I work a lot in the climate justice movement. Most of these grassroots organizations are funded by foundations. These foundations are going to be under enormous pressure. There’s going to be congressional hearings: are you giving your money to [inaudible] be under pressure to just start funding services and not organizing.

So there’s so many [inaudible] now including Greg Palast’s talk about the complete elimination of the Voting Rights Act, all of the other things, the civil rights protections that we’ve had, the restoration of Jim Crow, this is real. This is real. It’s in Project 2025, but it’s also been very consistent in the messaging of the MAGA right since they’ve taken over the Republican Party.

And they got to the Latinos. I heard Maria [inaudible] talking about Spanish language, social media. The Republicans had 10 messages to every one that the Democrats put out on Spanish language social media, and those are young Latino men who were already [inaudible] I ain’t going to vote for a woman, a Black woman. Are you kidding me? We have issues to deal with in our community.

So I think as we’re brushing the smoke away and trying to pick through the ashes to see what happened, how did this disaster come about? We need to understand this didn’t just happen since Biden dropped out and Harris came in. There’s real strong roots to this campaign. [Inaudible] a lot of factors, a lot of white workers are concerned [inaudible] about the economy. It’s Black and Brown women who got the worst of it, or ever before all this stuff was going on and did not run to the Republican Party, did not run to the Republican Party because there’s a level of political sophistication and understanding.

I don’t think anybody has any illusions that the are going to bring out a totally liberatory society, but understanding that at least there’s some leverage there. And now [inaudible], I have to believe Milley when he says Trump’s a fascist and he believes it.

[Inaudible] earlier that’s talking about we really have to, [inaudible] I agree with that, [inaudible] but stand now that the Palestinian movement that we’ve had the last four years is going to be under considerably more risk under a Trump administration.

Marc Steiner:  We all will.

Bill Gallegos:  They will try to drown it in blood. And they’ve already said that their immigration policy includes deporting anyone who’s been part of the pro-Palestinian movement who’s an international student.

This is the reality that we face now. It shouldn’t panic us. What it should say is we have to build a broad-based resistance movement, which is going to include some folks that we ordinarily ain’t going to work with, but we have to build a broad-based resistance movement — Both at the local level, I totally agree with that, we have to root it locally, but it has to be broad.

And I’m not even getting into the whole climate thing here where Trump’s pretty much about ready to toast the planet, and he says it. And the first communities that are going to feel the impact of his policies are poor Black and Brown communities that are already choking like no other community on the toxicity and pollution that comes out of us capitalism [crosstalk] —

Marc Steiner:  Can you say just a little more about that Bill? I want to underscore the fact that you have deep roots in the climate justice movement. You know what you’re talking about on climate. For everyone watching this is not just like, oh, the climate’s going to get worse. I want you to listen to Bill in terms of what the implications are for our shared planet right now.

Bill Gallegos:  Well, I’ll just start by saying this, that under the Biden administration, the environmental justice community, one, policies that we have never had with anyone, not even Obama. So for example, Justice40, which is a federal policy that a minimum of 40% of all federal environmental spending will go to frontline communities. Frontline communities are those that get the worst. 40%. This is a larger allocation of federal resources than the war on poverty. It’s $100 and some billion, $190 some billion that could potentially get to frontline communities.

It’s been slow rolling out because the federal bureaucracy is very complicated. Every federal department gets a certain amount of money and they all have their own rules and regulations, but there are organizations that are trying to help frontline communities access these funds for cleanup, clean energy development, job development, all of those things, mitigation. A certain percentage of that is for affordable housing.

So this was a huge victory that we’ve never had. It’s going to be gone. They’re saying that anything that has to do with equity will be gone. So those resources probably won’t survive a Trump administration. The Biden administration also adopted some very positive policies related to certain carcinogenic toxins and other forms of pollution that affect respiratory problems. Not everything we wanted. And they did open up a lot of drilling.

I’m not going to paint a picture that this was, we’re not talking about Arundhati Roy making policy for the Biden administration, but there was a lot that we won. I don’t want to just say it was because of the goodness of Biden’s heart, but because this movement has been organizing for years, and we had support from a lot of the big green groups: the Sierra Club, the NRDC, Earthjustice, supported the climate justice movement in making these demands.

So this was a pretty significant victory for our movement that is now at risk. And I don’t see how we hold onto the things that we’ve won. And Trump is pretty much saying it. He’s going to put polluters in charge of the EPA, if not close it down, the Department of the Interior. We’re not going to have Deb Haaland in there. We’re going to have somebody who wants to open all public land to corporate development.

So we’ve got our fight cut out for us as a climate justice movement. What I think we need is we need unity within that movement, because it’s been fragmented, and we need unity with a broad sector of our sisters and brothers in these national green groups — As well as with labor. We’ve always gotten played labor versus the environment, but now’s the time when we’ve got to come together.

We’ve always said that it’s not one or the other that clean jobs should be union jobs, we don’t want it to be a sweatshop and that there’s already one of the fastest areas of job growth in the energy sector. So we need to make certain that that happens so that as we phase out of fossil fuel and that whole dependency on that fossil fuel economy, there’s a real just transition.

But all of these things are now going to become qualitatively more difficult because of the fact that the Republicans probably got Congress, the Senate, and the White House, and a Supreme Court that’s going to give them any damn thing that they want.

So we have a challenge, but hey, in the lifetime of some of us, I’ve seen Jim Crow go down. I’ve seen it. I’ve seen women win reproductive justice. I’ve seen our gay and lesbian sisters and brothers win the right to marriage. I’ve seen foreign workers with the right to a union. So I’m always optimistic.

But I have to say that I wouldn’t compare this to the Nixon administration. This is something qualitatively different here. In the Nixon administration, the John Birch Society was considered fringe; now they run the party. Those kinds of racist and reactionary forces run and control one of the big ruling class parties of this country. And I saw the list that Standing for Democracy had, There’s something like 30 billionaires that had been funding this project, funding this MAGA Project 2025 thing. So there’s huge sections of the ruling class that are behind this.

I’m sorry a little bit for my rant here, but I guess what I really want to make certain is we don’t lose sight of the importance of the fight against racism and misogyny in this, and not pit it against class politics. Those are class politics, and they’re so central to any change that we want to make, whether it’s in the environment or public health or education just in the area of democracy, of protecting and expanding voting rights.

It’s always at the center because that’s the country we have. The history starting with the dispossession of genocide of Native peoples, the enslavement of Africans, the theft of half of Mexico’s territories. That’s the history that has shaped the country we have now, and really contributed a lot to the electoral results we have now. And if we run from it, we lose. If we take it on, we have a chance to win.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Ain’t got to apologize for that rant, brother, because I feel like that is absolutely the truth that folks need to hear right now, the sobering truth, but a truth that is not without hope.

And Marc, I want to toss it to you in a second to offer your closing thoughts in that realm as someone who, like Bill, has seen American history change in significant ways that my generation only learned about in books, but you’ve seen it happen.

And we have also seen major change in our lives. I remember when gay marriage became legal, I mean as one just minor — Not minor, but one example.

Marc Steiner:  It’s not minor, right.

Maximillian Alvarez:  So I do want to give you the closing word in a second about where we go from here and your closing messages for our audience. But I did want to pick up on something that Bill said about the importance of race and understanding the dynamics here and how it shapes our vision of the world that we think that we’re living in.

Because if you do the thought experiment here where you have aliens from Mars airdrop in and look at what they’re seeing, what they’re going to see in this election is a monster’s ball of billionaire oligarchs surrounding another billionaire oligarchy serving politician, from Musk, the richest man in the world literally campaigning with Trump, taking over X, using it as a propaganda platform, to the billionaires that own the Washington Post and the LA Times, putting their thumbs on the scale and not letting their papers like endorse a candidate, to the crypto bros and the financial Wall Street interests that arrayed to defeat senators like Sherrod Brown that are excited to get Lina Khan out of the government.

By all objective accounts, this is a billionaire’s takeover of what remains of our fledgling democracy. But so many people don’t see it that way because conditions that we’ve been discussing for the past two hours have allowed and enabled people to instead identify people who look like me, people who look like Bill as the enemy, people who don’t perform gender the same way that you do or identify the same way that you do as somehow the enemy.

They have managed to convince working people that their fellow workers to their left and their right, because of their race, because of their immigration status, because of how they identify, are somehow more responsible for our woes than the fucking billionaires up there who are destroying our planet, destroying our democracy, and are going to do a whole lot more damage in the coming four years.

That is an incredible feat that the oligarchy has pulled off, and they have done it through ages throughout history. This is the eternal struggle of working people: to realize who their true oppressors really are and to be able to cut through the noise and haze that makes us feel as if somehow our fellow workers who are different from us are responsible for our woes.

And I say that not just as a reporter, not just as a historian, but I say that as a person who is deeply worried right now that people in my own family are going to be deported. I want you people watching this to understand I’m not just a fucking face on a screen, I’m a human being just like you are, just like your neighbors are. And we are terrified for very justifiable reasons and we need to not succumb to that terror. We need to feel it but not become it. But I need people out there to understand that the terror is real and that it is going to change the terrain of struggle for all of us, and that we are going to need you to stand with us, and we are going to need to stand together to face whatever we are facing.

Bill, I’m sorry to cut you off. Please hop in there, and then Marc —

Bill Gallegos:  No, absolutely. You’re right. I don’t know about you, but I don’t carry around proof of citizenship with me and I’m güero, but they hear Gallegos, it’s dirty Mexican. And I live in a community in southeast Los Angeles. It’s a Black and Brown working-class community. Almost every house on this block is going to be at risk. They’re multigenerational. Yeah, this is for real.

And it brings me to one part of my rant that I didn’t get to drop in here, which is how the left and progressive women in this country have consistently overlooked the Chicano and Latino community as an important social force for change. There continues to be a mostly Black and Brown framework — And that’s only because Black folks, the Black liberation struggle has insisted on being taken seriously.

But it is another one of those things where I’ve been looking at a lot of these webinars that happen to talk about the elections and so on, almost never do I see a Latino or Latina voice here in those conversations. There’s a big one that’s happening later this afternoon. There’s a huge network, national network that’s developing as a resistance network, which I think is really important. But when I looked at the five or six speakers that they have, not a single one comes out of the Chicano or Latino, not the Puerto Rican community, not the Dominican community, not the Mexican American community. I know there’s only 37 million of us [Steiner laughs], but I could help them find some.

But I think this is a strategic problem: Do we want to win or not? Are we serious about building the kind of multiracial movement that really has a chance to impact our lives in the immediate and also for the transformative agenda that we have?

So this is kind of a consistent issue that I raise. I’m on the editorial board of The Nation magazine, I raise it to them all the damn time. I raise it in other arenas where, hey, we’re here. The unfortunate thing is that the left within those movements, both within the Puerto Rican liberation struggle and the Chicana liberation struggle, is very small. It’s weak. It’s, I think, stupidly fragmented when it doesn’t need to be. But that’s a problem because that leaves the political field open to more mainstream forces, more less progressive forces.

After all that happened with what the MAGA right and Trump said about the Puerto Ricans, they’re going to re-elect this Puerto Rican pro-Trump governor? What’s going on there? Well, I don’t blame the Puerto Rican people. I’m blaming us. Where are we? Where’s the attention that we’re giving to that movement? And especially the Democratic Party, they’ve got all these resources, but I’m also talking about the labor movement and the women’s movement. All these different movements need to direct their attention to an area where they have not had it. And that means not just with words, but with resources, with organizing. And don’t just come out every four years and ask for our vote.

The Democratic Party now is reaping what it has sowed, it reaped it in this last election. I was shocked even if I think the results are a little initial, clearly there were too many Chicanos and Puerto Ricans and other Latinos that were voting for Trump and the right against their own interests, maybe under some illusion that, well, we’ll finally get admitted into the club like the Italian immigrants did and the Polish immigrants did.

Since the 1840s, we haven’t been admitted into the club. I don’t think it’s going to happen now. Puerto Rico’s been a colony for how many years, They haven’t been admitted into that particular immigrant club. I don’t think it’s going to happen now. But I think there’s people who are desperate to believe that, and that’s affected them.

So yeah, we got a lot of work cut out for us. But what I really want to emphasize is for our folks on the left and progressive movements, don’t ignore us. You guys, Real News, you’re one of the few programs that ran something on the Chicano Moratorium. We hear a lot about Kent State, and we should, about the murder that happened when Nixon invaded Laos and Cambodia and the people that were shot there, but the Chicano Moratorium against the Vietnam War, three people were shot there. Why isn’t that an annual commemoration? And not just in our community, but in the broader progressive anti-war and peace community. Why is that not taken seriously as an important historical event that has meaning for us?

I guess I feel like I can raise this because I feel like I’m among friends and comrades when I’m raising this to comrades on progressive moments. And on the left, I feel like I can be honest and frank with you because you say that you’re for complete equity and equality and self-determination and liberation and all of those things. So I’m going to take you at your word and say, stop doing what you’re doing and start broadening your attention and enrich the movement that we’re trying to build.

Maximillian Alvarez:  I think that is a powerful point to end on from our amazing guest, Bill Gallegos of the Mexico Solidarity Project. He mentioned an episode of Marc’s show, the Marc Steiner show, where we had brother Bill and other guests on to talk about the history of the Chicano Moratorium. You should go listen to that episode, we released it back in August. So if you want to keep the conversation going after this livestream, go listen to that.

But for now, we are a little over time. I have had such a great time. It’s been very helpful for me to unpack the events of this week over the past two hours on this livestream. We are going to do more of these. We want to respond to more of your questions. We want to bring more guests on.

So I wanted to ask folks before I toss it to brother Marc Steiner here to close us out with his final thoughts, please subscribe to this channel if you’re not already, become a member of this channel if you’re not already, if you want additional perks and access to us and more engagement with us and our journalists. Please write into The Real News and let us know the topics you want covered, the folks you want us to have on. And please, please, please support the work that we do here. Go to therealnews.com/donate, click the donate button over here on YouTube to donate to The Real News now, because we can’t keep doing this work without you, and we know we are heading into hostile waters here and we’re going to need that support to hang on for as long as we can and to keep fighting for you. So our future depends on you and our collective future depends on what we all do next.

And so with that, I want to sign off and thank you for joining us. And I want to toss things over to Marc Steiner to give us his closing thoughts, and we’ll see you back here on the next livestream. Thank you all so much for watching.

Marc Steiner:  I’ll make it short and sweet because we’re a little bit over time, but we are in a very important moment here, a critical moment. And I just want to go back for two seconds to think about the things that Bill just pointed out, people like John Nichols pointed out and others on this broadcast is that if the Democrats had taken the ideas as you heard some of the people say on this program and turned them into a media organizing campaign, we’d have a different outcome of this election. If we fought for the truth and showed the truth to the world, to our country, it would’ve had a very different result than what we see today. I think that’s a really important point for us to realize.

And now the thing is we have to do that ourselves and we have to organize, and we have to make a broader coalition of all the media organizations on the left that’s being worked on. We’ve got to bring people together to say no, there’s a different way. And we have to do it because we’re not just facing a Republican Party, we’re facing a neofascist rise. These are very dangerous people who are now in charge of the United States government. They’re going to destroy the government Department of Education and more. Read Project 2025, understand what they’re about to do to us. And we have to stand up together to fight to stop it.

We cannot allow it to happen. This is our country. It’s all of us. It’s the greatest heterogeneous nation in the history of the planet. We can stop them. We have to stop them. And that’s part of our work right here at The Real News. And I want to thank you all for joining us.

Bill Gallegos:  Thank you all. Really appreciate it.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Thank you guys.

Thank you so much for watching The Real News Network, where we lift up the voices, stories, and struggles that you care about most. And we need your help to keep doing this work. So please tap your screen now, subscribe, and donate to The Real News Network. Solidarity forever.

This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Oct. 28, 2024. It is shared here with permission under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.

With the world on track for 3.1°C of warming this century, Oxfam International on Monday blamed global billionaires who—with their superyachts, private jets, and investments—emit more carbon pollution in 90 minutes of their lives than the average person does in a lifetime.

That’s according to Carbon Inequality Kills, Oxfam’s first-of-its-kind study tracking planet-heating emissions from the pricey transportation and polluting investments of the world’s 50 richest people, which was released ahead of COP29, the United Nations climate summit scheduled for next month in Baku, Azerbaijan.

“The superrich are treating our planet like their personal playground, setting it ablaze for pleasure and profit,” said Oxfam executive director Amitabh Behar in a statement. “Their dirty investments and luxury toys—private jets and yachts—aren’t just symbols of excess; they’re a direct threat to people and the planet.”

The report explains that “Oxfam was able to identify the private jets belonging to 23 of 50 of the world’s richest billionaires; the others either do not own private jets or have kept them out of the public record.”

“On average, these 23 billionaires each took 184 flights—spending 425 hours in the air—over a 12-month period. That is equivalent to each of them circumnavigating the globe 10 times,” the publication continues. “On average, the private jets of these 23 superrich individuals emitted 2,074 tonnes of carbon a year. This is equivalent to 300 years’ worth of emissions for the average person in the world, or over 2,000 years’ worth for someone in the global poorest 50%.”

For example, Elon Musk, the world’s richest person based on Monday updates to the Bloomberg and Forbes lists, “owns (at least) two private jets which together produce 5,497 tonnes of CO2 per year,” the study highlights. “This is the equivalent of 834 years’ worth of emissions for the average person in the world, or 5,437 years’ worth for someone in the poorest 50%.”

“The two private jets owned by Jeff Bezos, founder and executive chairman of Amazon, collectively spent almost 25 days in the air, emitting 2,908 tonnes of CO2. It would take the average U.S. Amazon employee almost 207 years to emit that much,” the document adds. Bezos is the world’s second- or third-richest person, according to the various billionaire indexes.

The report says that “the number of superyachts has more than doubled since 2000, with around 150 new launches every year. Not only do these giant ships guzzle an immense amount of fuel for propulsion, their air conditioning, swimming pools, and extensive staff further add to emissions. Although they are moored for most of the year, about 22% of their overall emissions are generated during this ‘downtime.'”

“Superyachts are exempt from both E.U. carbon pricing and International Maritime Organization emissions rules,” the publication points out. “Oxfam was able to identify 23 superyachts owned by 18 of the 50 billionaires in our study. These floating mansions traveled an average of 12,465 nautical miles a year: This is equivalent to each superyacht crossing the Atlantic almost four times.”

According to the group:

Oxfam estimates the average annual carbon footprint of each these yachts to be 5,672 tonnes, which is more than three times the emissions of the billionaires’ private jets. This is equivalent to 860 years of emissions for the average person in the world, and 5,610 times the average of someone in the global poorest 50%.

The Walton family, heirs of the Walmart retail chain, own three superyachts worth over $500 million. They traveled 56,000 nautical miles in a year with a combined carbon footprint of 18,000 tonnes: This is equivalent to the carbon emissions of around 1,714 Walmart shop workers. The company that has generated their extreme wealth has also been found to drive economic inequality in the USA through low wages, workplace discrimination, and huge CEO pay.

In terms of investments, the study says, “the richest 1% control 43% of global financial assets, and billionaires control (either as CEOs or principal investors) 34% of the 50 largest listed companies in the world, and 7 out of the 10 largest. The investment footprint of the superrich is the most important element of their overall impact on people and the planet.”

The organization found that “the average investment emissions of 50 of the world’s richest billionaires were around 2.6 million tonnes of CO2 equivalents (CO2e) each. That is around 340 times their emissions from private jets and superyachts combined.”

“Each billionaire’s investment emissions are equivalent to almost 400,000 years of consumption emissions by the average person, or 2.6 million years of consumption emissions by someone in the poorest 50% of the world,” the report says. “Almost 40% of the investments analyzed in Oxfam’s research were in highly polluting industries including: oil, mining, shipping, and cement. Only one billionaire, Gautam Adani, has significant investments in renewable energy—which account for 18% of his overall investment portfolio. Just 24% of the companies that these billionaires invested in have set net-zero targets.”

The publication also features “a new analysis of the inequality in the impacts of climate breakdown.”

Behar concluded that “Oxfam’s research makes it painfully clear: The extreme emissions of the richest, from their luxury lifestyles and even more from their polluting investments, are fueling inequality, hunger, and—make no mistake—threatening lives. It’s not just unfair that their reckless pollution and unbridled greed is fueling the very crisis threatening our collective future—it’s lethal.”

The document’s final section includes detailed recommendations to reduce the emissions of the richest, make polluters pay, and “reimagine our economies and societies to deliver well-being and planetary flourishing.”

The report is a reminder of how rich and powerful people are impeding efforts to meet the goals of the Paris climate agreement, whose government signatories will be gathering in Baku next month to discuss efforts to limit global temperature rise this century to 1.5°C.

“The wealth of the world’s 2,781 billionaires has soared to $14.2 trillion,” the study notes. “If it was invested in renewable energy and energy efficiency measures by 2030, this wealth could cover the entire funding gap between what governments have pledged and what is needed to keep global warming below 1.5°C, according to estimates by the International Renewable Energy Agency.”

Hurricane Helene devastated western North Carolina, including its prisons. Yet rather than evacuate incarcerated people, the state left prisoners locked up in their cells without running water or light to survive the storm on their own. Schuyler Mitchell, who recently covered this story for The Intercept, speaks to Rattling the Bars about this manmade disaster and its consequences.

Studio / Post-Production: Cameron Granadino

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Mansa Musa:

Welcome to this edition of Rattling the Bars. I’m your host, Mansa Musa. Imagine you are told that a major storm is coming your way, a hurricane of Katrina proportion is coming your way, and you’re told to evacuate. Would you evacuate or would you remain where you at? But more importantly, imagine that you cannot evacuate because you are incarcerated, because you are a prisoner in the prison industrial complex, in a carceral system that has no evacuation plans for the people that are incarcerated, or are imprisoned, or on the plantation. Joining me today is Schuyler Mitchell, who wrote an article called Hurricane-Struck North Carolina Prisoners Were Locked in Cells With Their Own Feces For Nearly a Week. Welcome, Schuyler.

Schuyler Mitchell:

Hi, thank you so much for having me.

Mansa Musa:

All right, and tell our audience a little bit about yourself, Schuyler.

Schuyler Mitchell:

Yeah, so I’m an independent investigative journalist. I am a columnist at Truthout, and then I also report for places including The Intercept, which is where I wrote this investigation. I report on a lot of different things, but lots of different instances of power, corruption, cases where the people in power, or powerful corporations, or whatever it is, aren’t treating people with dignity or kind of doing what they’re supposed to be doing. So I do some reporting and research on the prison industrial complex. So yeah, I started working on this story after Hurricane Helene.

Mansa Musa:

Right, and I’m going to open up by saying, well, it’s a quote that you had in your article, say, “We thought we were going to die there. We didn’t think anybody was going to come back for us.” Did anybody come back for them, or if they did come back, how did they come back?

Schuyler Mitchell:

Yeah, so for context, so Hurricane Helene hit in the middle of the night, late Thursday night, early morning hours, Friday, September 27th. And at this one institution called Mountain View in Spruce Pine, North Carolina, from late that night until Wednesday, October 2nd, nearly a week, they didn’t think anybody was going to come back for them. They had no running water, no potable water. There was a shipment of potable drinking water that came several days in. But before that, they were drinking from the sinks is what family members told me, not knowing that what they were essentially drinking was sewer water, because it was non-potable water after the hurricane hit.

They didn’t have lights in their cells, there were some emergency lights that a generator supplied in common areas. And the generator supplied, I heard, power to the prison guards’ laptops or computers, but they didn’t have power in the cell. So yeah, so for five days, thinking about being in darkness, some people reported having water in their cells from flooding if you were on the bottom floor of the facility. Very few food rations. You know, crackers for breakfast or a piece of bread with peanut butter for dinner, and the response was slow.

So there were several facilities throughout Western North Carolina that were eventually evacuated. It was very disorganized is what family members told me, right, where in the case of Mountain View, it’s less than half a mile away from another facility called Avery-Mitchell. And Avery-Mitchell also, their power went out, their water lines were busted, but they got evacuated 24 hours before Mountain View did.

And when you’re in those conditions, 24 hours, and you don’t know if anybody’s going to come save you, that’s a long time, when they’re right next to each other. So the family members were saying they didn’t understand why one facility got evacuated first, and even that one, they had a multi-day delay. And there was a period of many days where family members were trying to get information about what was happening at these facilities, but prisons are by design a black box. It’s really hard [inaudible 00:04:37]-

Mansa Musa:

Right, right.

Schuyler Mitchell:

… information about what’s going on.

Mansa Musa:

Okay, let’s talk about this, then. Okay, how did you become involved? Somebody reached out to you and asked that you could possibly intervene or make some noise about their conditions? That’s how you initially got involved, or was you just doing your due diligence?

Schuyler Mitchell:

Yeah, so it’s actually the second. I knew that Western… I’m originally from North Carolina, I’m not from the mountains, but I know, I grew up going there a lot, I spent a lot of time there, I knew that there were lots of facilities that were in the path of the hurricane. And so I just started doing some research to see if I had seen any other reporting about what happened at those prisons. And there was actually a press release on the morning of October 2nd from the North Carolina Department of Corrections that said that they’d evacuated a certain number of facilities. [inaudible 00:05:33]-

Mansa Musa:

Yeah.

Schuyler Mitchell:

… was five. And so then, what I did was I actually took the names of the different facilities from that press release, and I put them on Facebook, because after the hurricane, Facebook was still a big place for where people were exchanging information. There were all these different Facebook groups, like Hurricane Helene Safety Check-In, where people were posting, trying to find their loved ones. It was a horrible situation across the western part of the state. But what I saw when I put in the name Mountain View or Avery-Mitchell were posts for days of people posting in these groups, commenting on the Department of Corrections Facebook page, saying, “What’s going on? Do you have any information for me?”

And then, finally, after several days, on October 2nd, there were a couple posts from people who said, “I finally heard from my loved one, he gave me a call. He’s been evacuated, but for days, they were in horrible conditions.” And people were posting that, and so I just reached out to them and I spoke to… There were at least five people I spoke to that had direct knowledge of what happened at Mountain View, but then I also spoke to like five or four more family members as well from other facilities.

And everybody had the same story about lack of communication and just utter panic for nearly a week, just not knowing what was going on. And then, specifically in the case of Mountain View, everybody told me the exact same things about their loved ones calling them, finally, after nearly a week and saying, “I’m okay. I’m now on the eastern part of the state, but the things that I saw in Mountain [inaudible 00:07:11] for nearly a week were just horrible.” And having to defecate in plastic bags because the toilets are full.

You know, I went to the Department of for comment. Obviously as a journalist, it’s something that you have to go to them for comment. And what the spokesperson said to me, they acknowledged that this had happened, and they were like, “That was a solution that they devised on their own,” and were kind of dismissive, which is interesting, because the question is, “Well, why did they have to devise that solution?” So yeah, I actually found the story just from looking on Facebook and reaching out to people who had been impacted.

Mansa Musa:

And in terms of the information, and you definitely was able to capture what was going on in real time. Talk about the… Because you just mentioned about the Department of Corrections or the Division of Corrections response, and they sanitized it in certain quotes. You know, “No, no, we had water,” plausible denial. But talk about, in your investigation, was you ever able to discern from them, do they have evacuation plans for these type of events?

Schuyler Mitchell:

I mean, they said they did. Again, it’s like a black box, so it’s really hard to know. I think what we do know from what happened is that there was not a proactive response. If they’d had a proactive plan in place, there wouldn’t have been a five-day period where people weren’t knowing when their next meal was coming, or not knowing if they would have enough water. One of the things that I heard was people making decisions about, “Should I use this water to bathe myself or drink it?” You know, because there were limited rations.

So I don’t know what the plan was. Eventually, they did follow through on a plan, because they did evacuate certain facilities. But who’s to say what if things went according to their plan that they already had in place, that either way, the outcome was not what it should have been. And I did see that there is actually a petition circulating, asking the federal system… And so I should clarify, these were state prisons, but the federal DOJ, they also have a Bureau of Prisons. And yeah, there was a petition circulating, asking the government to have a clear evacuation plan in place. And I think we saw this happen then again in Florida, right, with Hurricane [inaudible 00:09:53]-

Mansa Musa:

Right, right, talk about that.

Schuyler Mitchell:

… after. Yeah, so less than, what, less than two weeks after Hurricane Helene, Hurricane Milton was barreling towards Florida, and there were state correctional facilities that were in the mandatory evacuation zones that were not evacuated. Ultimately, I didn’t see any reporting after that said… There was a lot of coverage of Florida before that happened I think because of the situation had just happened in North Carolina. I think people were more attuned to the fact that this was something that they needed to keep an eye on, the fact that incarcerated people just are often overlooked and [inaudible 00:10:30]-

Mansa Musa:

Right, right.

Schuyler Mitchell:

So there was definitely a lot more pressure on the State Department of Corrections in advance of Hurricane Milton to evacuate facilities. I don’t believe they did, but it’s just another example of different state systems also have different policies and respond in different ways. And one of the things that the family members I spoke with fed again and again was just people, they feel overlooked, they feel like nobody cares. And obviously, lots of people are really hurting across Western North Carolina from [inaudible 00:11:07] hurricane, but people often just don’t think about people who didn’t have any choice to evacuate or any choice of what they were going to do when the storm hit.

And we know there were lots of people that were missing after the hurricane, but these are all people that are in the state’s care, right? It’s the state’s responsibility to ensure their well-being. There should have never been a period where people didn’t know where their loved ones were. They knew, they were in the state system. Yeah, and it’s just going to be an issue that’s going to continue.

The Intercept actually did a project several years ago called Climate and Punishment, where they mapped DHS data about prisons across the country, with different information about wildfire, heat, and flood [inaudible 00:11:54]-

Mansa Musa:

Right, right, right.

Schuyler Mitchell:

And they did this in-depth investigation about the impact of the climate crisis on prisons. But whether it’s flooding, or severe heat, or wildfires, this is just an issue that’s not going away. And I think it’s right to call for more transparency about what the plan is in these.

Mansa Musa:

And I want to unpack some of you say for the benefit of our audience. Like you say, a mandatory evacuation site, a lot of the plantations in the prison industrial complex is in areas that will be evacuated, because of any type of climate situation, or be it, like you say, fires, or hurricanes, or rain, or inclement weather, like frigid weather. A lot of these prisons or a lot of these plantations are in these areas that they designate. They designate this as an evacuation zone, “This is a mandatory evacuation.”

So the reality is that they could look at it and say, “Okay, this is a mandatory evacuation zone. Oh, we got four facilities that house anywhere from 2,500 to 3,000 people collectively, or more.” And in terms of, all right, you recognize that the population that need to be evacuated, but when you start making an assessment of evacuation, they don’t even include them in the conversation. They’re not even included in the conversation in the sense of, “Okay, they’re in the path of Hurricane Helene. We know it’s coming, we telling people to get out of town. What is our plan for this population right here?”

They don’t have no plan, because that’s by the design. It’s by design. You know, according to the 13th Amendment, we are slaves under the system of the 13th Amendment. So therefore, the value that’s associated with our lives is not. Was you able to glean this from your research, or from this particular article, or your study in general?

Schuyler Mitchell:

Yeah, I mean, so the interesting thing in Western North Carolina was there weren’t the same mandatory evacuation orders, just because I think that region is not used to seeing these types of hurricanes. So I think it just really walloped the area. And it did take people by surprise, even though there were warnings and forecastings. But unlike in the case of Florida, where there were absolutely mandatory evacuation zones, where they’ve made the explicit choice not to evacuate those prisons…

I think, yeah, I mean, but in reporting on the prison system, you see this time and time again, where it’s incredibly hard, for example, for incarcerated people to win cases that they bring against prisons or prison guards for mistreatment, or for instances where their human rights have been violated. The bar for winning those lawsuits and getting any sort of justice is intentionally set really high. One of the women that I spoke with for my article, her husband was one of the people at Mountain View. They have three kids, a teenager and two young kids. And she said to me that she herself has also been in prison before. And she said, “When he was telling me about some of his experiences in the past, I didn’t really believe it could be that bad. But then, I actually was on the inside and I saw it myself.”

And that’s something that didn’t even make its way into the piece, but she was saying… But she was the one who said, actually at the end of the story, “When you’re in there, you’re treated less than a human. You’re treated like a rabid dog,” and that was an exact quote. And so yeah, once you start talking to people, lots of people have similar stories, and I think the climate crisis really exacerbates these existing inequalities, and really reveals how neglected people can be. And when I went for comment to the Department of Corrections, they said, “Well, lots of people in Western North Carolina have it way worse.” That was almost exactly what the response was. And even just in the official statement, there wasn’t a full, of course, acknowledgement of what people had said that they had gone through.

One of the other things that was interesting to me about Mountain View was actually a day before the hurricane hit, somebody committed suicide at that facility. And what one of the women said to me, she was asking questions about, “What was it like there, that he decided that he needed… That was his only way out?” And Mountain View, it’s single cells, so people are locked in their cells for most of the hours of the day, and they’re allowed to do their job for the lunch hour. But it was pretty high, it was a medium-security facility, but there wasn’t a lot of freedom of movement at that facility.

And it’s not the exact same thing as solitary, but everybody I spoke to… I spoke to somebody also who was incarcerated and who lived through everything that happened at Mountain View. His partner was able to connect me with him through the Department of Corrections phone system. And I spoke to him, and they all say that it’s a pretty… Even when there’s not a hurricane, it’s not a great place to be. I guess nobody expects prisons to be great or anything like [inaudible 00:17:58]-

Mansa Musa:

Right. No, I understand. [inaudible 00:17:58]-

Schuyler Mitchell:

… learn about it. It’s quite bad, the conditions that people have to-

Mansa Musa:

And the crazy part about that is, like you say, it’s medium security, and the security paradigm, you have max, medium, minimum, and pre-release. So in the case of Mountain View, most of these individuals are transitioning out. So it’s not like they’re having served significant time. But more importantly, the reality is that the system in North Carolina or throughout this country is really designed to dehumanize us, to ignore our humanity.

And when, like you say, global warming, climate crisis that’s developing in the world, people that’s incarcerated or on the plantation, we got it bad, because we’re not considered human to begin with. We’re considered slaves. And in terms of the monies that’s going to be invested in trying to get us out of a situation that’s a natural disaster, is not priority for the state. But answer this question, have you ever been able to glean, like is it a FEMA response that could be used for this type of situation, in hindsight?

Schuyler Mitchell:

I’m not sure about how the FEMA response would overlap with the State Department of Corrections, unfortunately. Yeah, I think that again, what we do now is that this is a population of people that are always an afterthought, and yeah, whatever resources that can be made available to prevent this from happening again, clearly, there’s a need for that. But yeah, I don’t know about FEMA specifically in this case.

Mansa Musa:

Okay, and in terms, as we get ready to close out, because you talk to the family members, and tell our audience how your sense coming from them, their anxiety and their stress, as it relates to this type of situation? Because really, we need people to understand that, okay, “You saying that I did something to go to prison, got that. You’re saying that I’m serving a sentence, got that. You’re saying that I’m going to be confined to a prison, got that. But you’re also saying, according to the Constitution of the United States, I can’t be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment. I got to be treated like a human being at some junction. But at the same token, my family is not locked up, my family is not sentenced to a certain time, and my family is my family, and taxpayers, and have a right to know what’s going on with me.” Talk about the family members or your conversation. What did you take away from them?

Schuyler Mitchell:

Yeah, I mean, my conversations with family members were incredibly moving. And I spoke to people who… This was an all-men’s prison, so it was people’s sons, partners, husbands, yeah, siblings, whatever that were in there. And one of the things that someone said to me, she was like, “Nobody cares or pays attention to this until someone like you, a journalist starts looking into it.” That was one sentiment that I heard. There was another woman where her 26-year-old son was one of the people in the prison, and she was saying, “He might be 26, but he’s still my son. And I called around and I got a voicemail for somebody who works in the prison system, and the voicemail said, ‘Please only leave messages in the case of emergency. Don’t leave a message if you’re asking about the whereabouts of a certain inmate’,” was the voicemail. And she said to me, she was like, “How dare he say that? Because it is an emergency if I don’t know where my son is.”

And another person said, “My Sammy, my loved one, he did something bad. He deserves to serve his time, but he’s still a person [inaudible 00:22:18]-“

Mansa Musa:

Right.

Schuyler Mitchell:

“… and he’s still very much loved.” And that was, of course, the message over, and over, and over again was like, these are people, people love them. They knew they were going to prison. They didn’t sign up for being cruel and unusual punishment, days of not being evacuated. And yeah, I think if everybody could have the conversations that I had… I mean, I was very grateful to these people for opening up to me and trusting me with their stories. I think there’s so much more coverage that needs to be done on this issue.

I mean, there’s just no end to the amount of abuses that take place across the federal and state prison system. I mean, this wasn’t even a private prison, so that’s a whole other layer. But yeah, everybody just really was saying that they felt like no one cared and they felt unheard. And I think one of the things that is good about doing this work is you do see how many people do care and want to talk about this issue. And I think as many people that can to spread important information about the prison system, like what you’re doing on the show, and report on the issue, it’s so important, and people really, really value that.

Mansa Musa:

And as we close out, I want to make sure that I always understand what we’re talking about, because if this same situation took place in a foreign country, that United States citizens was being held in captivity, that a national disaster came through there, and it came back to this country that they were standing in their feces, they was drinking sewer water, they didn’t know whether they were going to live or die, they was given food that was not nutritional, we would be up in arms and an uproar, protesting, everybody, the four winds, talking about taking any funding we giving this country, stopping everything.

We are coming short in sending a [inaudible 00:24:21] courier over there to take our people out there or take their citizen out. We’re talking about right here in the United States of America, and where we don’t have the common decency as a state to recognize that we are dealing with human beings, no matter what they did, that this is human beings that we’re dealing with. As we close out, what do you want our audience to take away from this article, Ms. Mitchell?

Schuyler Mitchell:

Yeah, I mean, I think what you just said is a really great point. I think yeah, what I want people to take away from this article is this is one specific prison, one specific case after one specific hurricane. I mean, think about it on a national scale, think about how many people we have in this country that are incarcerated. We have a massive prison industrial complex. Yeah, and I think just as we are all increasingly impacted by natural disasters and are able to make choices about what we do in those situations, this is a massive population of people that has, by definition, had choice taken away from them. And they don’t [inaudible 00:25:37]-

Mansa Musa:

Exactly.

Schuyler Mitchell:

They don’t have a say, and they don’t have a voice, and it’s really hard to get information in and out. So yeah, it’s just many layers of problems that are piled on top of each other. And yeah, that’s I think my biggest takeaway. And what you said is so important. If this happened anywhere else, people would be able to, I think, kind of see it for what it was. But it’s hard to see it when it’s in your own country, for a lot of the time.

Mansa Musa:

And if our audience, and the viewers, and listeners want to follow your work, how can they stay in touch with you or track your work?

Schuyler Mitchell:

Yeah, I am on Twitter. It’s my first name, Schuyler, with an underscore in between the Y and the L. And I think my email should be on my website, but if people actually have any insights, have anybody that they know that’s in a prison or anything that they want me to look into or cover, I’m super passionate about this issue, and I love to do investigations. So if you need somebody to dig deep, I’m your girl. So yeah, feel free to reach out to me with any tips as well.

Mansa Musa:

There you have it. Real News, Rattling the Bars. Schuyler, you rallied the bars today. You brought to the attention to raise the national consciousness about how do we treat people as human beings. How do we treat people? Should we treat them as human beings or should we treat them as numbers? It stands to reason that the state of North Carolina is looking at people as numbers, and in both sense, a number in terms of how much money they can make off of them, and a number in the sense of when they don’t have to do nothing for them, they just write them off.

We want our audience to understand, and we want our listeners to be mindful of this here, we’re talking about human beings. This is a humane issue. This is not an issue that’s dealing with whether a person did something or didn’t do something. They are wards of the state, and when you say you’re a ward of the state, the state is obligated to provide for your safety, and your safety is important, and your safety should be not compromised by virtue of you not having an evacuation plan in effect, for you not having the necessary infrastructure to ensure that people that are under your custody that’s coming home, it wasn’t like they not coming, they coming home at one time or another, and that you treat them less than human. Schuyler, we appreciate you. We appreciate your advocacy, and we look forward to staying in touch with you. Thank you very much.

Schuyler Mitchell:

Thank you so much.

Over the past two weeks, people around the country have watched in horror as our neighbors and fellow workers have been battered by the successive disasters of Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton. “After making landfall as a Category 4 hurricane on Sept. 26 and tearing through the Gulf Coast of Florida,” Adeel Hassan and Isabelle Taft write in The New York Times, “Helene plowed north through Georgia and walloped the Blue Ridge Mountains, washing out roads, causing landslides and knocking out power and cell service for millions of people. Across western North Carolina, towns were destroyed, water and fuel supplies were disrupted, and residents were in a communications black hole, scrambling for Wi-Fi to try to reach friends and family… As of Oct. 6, there were more than 230 confirmed deaths from the storm.” The hurricanes have passed, but the devastation and dire need they left in their wake remain. In this urgent mini-cast, we speak with two guests who are on the ground in Asheville, NC, providing relief and mutual aid to their community: Byon Ballard, a cofounder of the Mother Grove Goddess Temple in Asheville, where she serves as Senior Priestess, and Lori Freshwater, a journalist and relief aid volunteer who is originally from North Carolina.

Additional links/info below:

• Mother Grove Goddess Temple website, Facebook page, and Instagram
• Mother Grove Goddess Temple volunteer and donation information page
• Beloved Asheville website, Facebook page, and Instagram
• Adeel Hassan & Isabelle Taft, The New York Times, “What we know about Hurricane Helene’s destruction so far”
• Dharna Noor, The Guardian, “Double punch of hurricanes could become common due to climate crisis”
• Oliver Milman, The Guardian, “‘It’s mindblowing’: US meteorologists face death threats as hurricane conspiracies surge”
• Oliver Milman & Jonathan Watts, The Guardian, “Global heating makes hurricanes like Helene twice as likely, data shows”
• Lauren Aratani, The Guardian, “Insurance is failing hurricane survivors: ‘People thought they were covered’”

Permanent links below:

• Leave us a voicemail and we might play it on the show!
• Labor Radio / Podcast Network website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• In These Times website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• The Real News Network website, YouTube channel, podcast feeds, Facebook page, and Twitter page

Featured Music:
Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

Studio Production: Max Alvarez
Post-Production: Jules Taylor

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Lori Freshwater:

Hey Max, I am Lori Freshwater and I am originally from North Carolina, although I’m on the coast, but when I heard that my beloved mountains were in trouble, I had to come here and see if there was anything I could do to help and I found the Mother Grove goddess where I am today. I’m a journalist, kind of a nomadic journalist, and so I’m going to be here for the foreseeable future trying to get the news out about what the needs are here in Western North Carolina.

Byron Ballard:

I’m Byron Ballard. I am one of the founders, one of the co-founders, and I serve as senior priestess for the Mother Grove Goddess Temple here in Asheville. We are a church that honors and celebrates the divine feminine in whatever spiritual tradition you’re in, and we’ve been around for about 18 years doing public rituals, teaching classes, and this is our first and we are hoping, hoping it is going to be our last major push on relief efforts. Please. Oh, please.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright, welcome everyone to another episode of Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Brought to you in partnership within these Times magazine and the Real News Network produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like You Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast network. If you’re hungry for more worker and labor focus shows like ours, follow the link in the show notes and go check out the other great shows in our network and please support the work we’re doing here at Working People because we can’t keep going without you. And please support the work that we do at The Real News Network by going to the real news.com/donate, especially if you want to see more reporting from the front lines of struggle around the US and across the world.

My name is Maximillian Alvarez and we’ve got an urgent episode for y’all today. If you have been watching the news or just going outside in the record breaking October heat, then you like me, have surely been feeling ever more anxious and uneasy about the intensifying effects of climate change. If you live in the American Southeast, however, chances are you are feeling the disastrous effects of what must be understood as a full-blown climate emergency. Over the past two weeks, those of us around the country have watched in horror as our neighbors and fellow workers have been battered by the successive terrors of Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton. As a deal, Hassan and Isabelle Taft write in the New York Times after making landfall as a category for hurricane on September 26th and through the Gulf coast of Florida, Helene plowed north through Georgia and walloped the Blue Ridge Mountains washing out roads causing landslides and knocking out power and cell service for millions of people.

Across Western North Carolina. Towns were destroyed. Water and fuel supplies were disrupted and residents were in a communications black hole scrambling for wifi to try to reach friends and family officials raced to rescue survivors, locate victims, and restore flood damaged water systems. The chaos in the state was part of a path of destruction that Helene carved through the region, including portions of Tennessee, South Carolina and Virginia. As of October 6th, there were more than 230 confirmed deaths from the storm. Helene is the deadliest tropical cyclone to strike the mainland United States since 2005 when Hurricane Katrina caused nearly 1400 deaths on the Gulf Coast. According to statistics from the National Hurricane Center, pounding rain flash, floods and dangerous landslides savage, the area around Asheville and Western North Carolina putting the region in crisis. It’s like a mini apocalypse said Gretchen Hogan, a resident of Brevard, North Carolina. Now the hurricanes may have passed, but the devastation and dire need they left in their wake remain.

The stories coming out of communities ravaged by Helene and Milton are ghastly, devastating and heartbreaking. And the reality that humanity has been barreling down a decades long path to the extremely predictable climate emergency we’re now in is in infuriating, terrifying and overwhelming, but out of darkness. There has been light out of crisis, an outpouring of love, solidarity, and sacrifice, and today we are talking with two incredible human beings on the ground around Asheville, where communities have been directly impacted and where folks have been working overtime to provide relief and mutual aid to their community. Lori Byron, thank you so much for joining us today amidst all this chaos. We really, really appreciate it and I promise I won’t keep you too long. I was wondering if we could just start by turning things over to you and asking if you could talk us through what you have been seeing, feeling, experiencing, hearing from your community there in Asheville since Hurricane Helene hit and especially in the weeks since.

Byron Ballard:

I’ve got to be honest with you, many of the people that I talk to and deal with every day aren’t feeling anything. We can’t. We can’t because there’s too much work to do to stop and process. So we’ll do that later. I’m dreaming of a trip to the beach in the winter where nobody’s there and I don’t have to answer anybody else’s questions. We are in a place that we’re in the middle of a natural disaster. We’re at the beginning of a natural disaster. There are places that look perfect and untouched only to discover that there’s four feet of toxic mud inside them. My family has lived on the French Broad River since they came from an adjoining county at the end of the 19th century, and I lived there still, but high up so that I could watch the river rise in 1916. This river rose to 22.4, I think feet above its banks and it was over 27 feet for this flood.

So it is the worst flood that anyone here has ever historically experienced. What we are looking at is need on every possible level. So people need water because the water system is destroyed. There are towns that are gone. There’s a little sweet little touristy town called chimney rock, and it is much of it is simply gone. It’s not that the trees are down and there’s some mud, it’s that the buildings are gone. There is a beautiful valley called Swano, which we understand is a native ward and I don’t know if it’s creek or Cherokee, but that means beautiful valley and it is a long valley between heading east out of Asheville, heading towards downstate and the Swanno River, which is a tiny little drought, water river most of the time floods a lot and it flood flooded. It flooded in a horrific and substantial way so that the Swanno Valley is now the Swanno Valley of the shadow of death.

And for over a week it was almost impossible to get in and people would get in with a four wheel drive or an A TV or however they could do it and do the basics, pull people off the roofs of their houses, get the people into shelter and safety. It was extreme wartime triage, and I’ve heard that again and again from people who say, I was in Korea, I was in Iraq, and this is wartime damage. We are fortunate in that no one is bombing us actively. But yeah, that’s what we’re looking at. And at this point, two weeks in much of the triage is accomplished. People have water people, the hierarchy of needs are met with exception of shelter. And that’s what everyone is working on now, cleaning up, rebuilding, building where they can, but the infrastructure is gone.

The water system can’t be rebuilt in places because there are no roads left in those places. So first a road has to be built and then the water system can be addressed. And I want to address one thing right now, right up front there’s a lot, lot of misinformation. And here in the mountains we would just call it damn lion about what is and is not here. FEMA is here, the Army Corps of Engineers is here. We have had utility workers from as far away as Canada to reestablish power here. The government that everybody hates is here and they are functioning, but the terrain is impossibly difficult. So there are still without any doubt, families and individuals in the far western part of this state and in the higher elevations in these counties around here and in Buncombe County that have not been reached yet because it’s the terrain.

These are among the oldest mountains in the world and people look at ’em and go, well, they’re not the Rockies. They shouldn’t be too bad. Well, they’re bad, they’re bad. And because decisions were made on a higher level than any of us, we’ve had ridge top development and steep slope development that never should have happened because in addition to the flooding, we have landslides, we have rock falls. They tell us in order to drive the federal highway I 40 west to get from North Carolina to Tennessee, we will not be able to do that until November of 2025. So that’s the level of destruction. I’m going to say one more thing and I’m going to turn it over. Last night we had been expecting a load of supplies from the Charlotte area and the fellow got here and with his father-in-law, and we started unpacking all that we needed unpack.

And he turned me and just grabbed me in a big bear hug and looked in my face and he said, I don’t know if I should say this to you, but I was in Katrina and this is worse than Katrina. And he had tears in his eyes. So we know. But to get back to your first question, what are we feeling? We can’t feel that yet. Not yet, because we’re still delivering water, we’re still collecting diapers and bleach wipes and every afternoon we drink elderberry, tincture and hope we’re not going to get sick. Yeah, I mean that’s our reality right here on the ground.

Lori Freshwater:

Thank you, Byron. I would really also like to kind of clear up from people on the ground some of these absolutely insane conspiracies. I complained about FEMA being slow, getting in here with water openly. So I’m not someone who is afraid to criticize the government, but they are here and you see them with vest everywhere and they’re going around to people that are in the parks and that just clearly don’t have any place to go. The Army Corps of Engineers is here. I was listening to the Buncombe County press conference this morning and just heard this statistic that was just mind blowing from the Army Corps of Engineer Engineers. He said that there are an estimated, there’s an estimated 10 million tons of debris out here, 10 million tons of debris that has to be taken care of. So that alone is enough to just cripple the entire area if we aren’t really all working together. And that’s what people have been doing. They’ve been working together in a way that I’ve never seen through any other community. People have been communicating with people in far areas. They’ve been looking online in different Facebook groups to see, oh, there’s somebody that needs a meal for their autistic child. We can bring it up.

People are rising above what I would have ever even expected or dreamed. And I would just ask the rest of America to kind of the best thing you could do for the people of Western North Carolina is to follow their example. Stop looking at hate and conspiracies and things that push people down and look at what is going on here now and get your As to work. Sorry, that was a little interruption from Byron. They’re welcome to come here and work as well. We have plenty of work to do. But would just say what I’ve seen here has been really, really special and incredible. And I think that what I want to do going forward is to tell other communities whether you are a coastal community or wildfire or just a community that hasn’t been touched yet, start working together now with your community because that’s what’s going to save you.

Luckily the people here, were able to get things together quickly and are still trying to do so, but when you have to go to a cashless society overnight, it’s like no technology. So there’s no way to buy gas. There’s no way to buy food. You run out of cash pretty quickly. You want to be prepared. And so that’s a big lesson that I would say Max, that people really need to take from this is get going now. Get to know your neighbors, get out there and talk to people in your community and say, who’s got these skills? Who has a chainsaw? Who’s a good organizer on doing meal drops? That kind of thing. And that’s what people should be doing instead of talking about conspiracy theories, how you get through disasters, that’s how we become better Americans and that’s how we become better humans. So that’s my little preach for the day Max.

Maximillian Alvarez:

No, I can’t thank you both enough for laying that out and preaching the good word that needs to be heard right now. I want us to end here in a second by talking about those relief and mutual aid efforts and the light that has come out of this darkness. The great Mr. Rogers famously said, in a moment of disaster or crisis like this, we always need to look for the helpers. We need to know that there are people there helping and you all are out there helping. And I want folks listening to this to look for the helpers and to be the helpers. And I want to emphasize that the people out there spreading misinformation and conspiracy theories and all that crap are not helping shit. So I want us to end on that in a second. And pardon my French, it’s heartbreaking hearing what you guys are laying out for us.

And I just wanted to, by way of getting us to the final question here, I want hover on something that you guys said about how other communities need to be preparing themselves for eventualities like this. Because when the catastrophe comes, you’re going to need your neighbors more than you ever thought you would. But this really speaks to the heart of an investigation that we’ve been doing on this podcast for years now. We’ve been interviewing working class people, living, working and fighting in different, so-called sacrifice zones around the country, places like East Palestinian, Ohio where working class residents have had their lives upended by the derailment unavoidable derailment of a Norfolk southern bomb train two years ago almost, right? And to communities here in South Baltimore who are being poisoned by another railroad, a medical trash incinerator, all that kind of work that we’ve done to talk to folks, living in areas like that has taught us something that I’ve said on this show many times is that we are all more or less being set up for sacrifice.

And in these communities you can see the future that’s in store for most of us. And if you don’t believe that, just look at the last two weeks. Listen to what Byron said about the toxic sort of sludge that you can’t control where that stuff goes when a hurricane hits your area. What about the mountaintop removal that’s increasing the likelihood for deadly landslides? I mean, what about the insurance companies that are telling people after a natural disaster that they are shit out of luck? I mean, this is what we mean when we say we all need to care about this and we all need to be fighting together against this because we’re all being set up for sacrifice. And that is unacceptable on every single level. And so I can’t stress that enough for people out there listening, please don’t comfort yourself with the notion that you’re going to be fine even if others aren’t.

And just hoping and praying that you live in a safe zone. We need to be proactive about this. And I just can’t emphasize that enough. And I know I can’t keep you both for much longer because you have the vital work to do of repairing your community and meeting your community members’ needs. And once again, we can’t thank you enough for doing that work. I want to just ask if you could tell our listeners a bit more about the kind of relief work that you’ve been doing, the kind of needs in the community that you referenced earlier that are ongoing, the different orgs, volunteer groups that are doing the work of helping and what folks out there listening right now can do to support those efforts and support our fellow workers in these regions battered by the hurricanes.

Lori Freshwater:

Right. Thank you for all that and thank you for just, it’s so nice to talk to someone so informed from a distance about what’s going on, not just here, but like you said, so many places. I was at a place called Beloved Asheville yesterday, which is they’ve kind of risen to the top of the organization chart. It’s amazing to watch. I was there a couple of days after the storm and I watched them ramp up and now I think it’s acres out there and they’re on social media, so please go find them on social media. They’re posting a lot of videos and reels and that kind of thing, and it really does show you how massive their relief efforts have become. And they have everything from gas cans, camping supplies, things we still need. By the way, it’s getting cold here. So we need blankets, we need clothes for people, gloves, those kinds of things.

We need medical first aid supplies. Like Byron said, I think we’re okay on water. We need to keep distributing what’s here and make sure that people aren’t getting left out, but we are pivoting now to a different kind of needs. When I was at Beloved Asheville, I spoke to the co co person facilitator, I’m not sure if his title, I apologize. And he was saying that what we need is land and we need housing, and that’s what we need to start thinking of now. Instead of saying, well, this isn’t the time to think of that, it is the time to think of that. There was a homeless population here before and now that population, we don’t know. We have no idea how many people are homeless in Western North Carolina right now. So his point is so valid. We need to be thinking about getting land and building housing for people and people who are owning investment homes here.

They need to do the moral thing since our laws won’t force them to do it, and they need to stop sitting on empty houses in these places where people are homeless. So that’s the focus going forward. How can we not just get to where we were, but how can we come out better? So that’s what I would say. And I think I would just ask Byron if she has a couple of things to say that people are sending here that we might have enough of or things that we need. Let me see what she has to say because kind of really got her eye on everything coming and going. Right now,

Byron Ballard:

I course want to talk about Barnardsville. So we heard early on that Barnardsville was a disaster, and it is the big Ivy River, which is kind of a misnomer. It’s never been a real big river, but the devastating flood on that river in this little valley, again, in this beautiful little valley, we just heard how terrible it was. So we loaded it up, a four wheel drive with water, food, diapers, all of that. We headed out there and the road was good, and that is a huge blessing. The road was good, but on a quarter mile, either side of the road, it looked apocalyptic.

Lori Freshwater:

It really max. It does. I have to just say it really does look like what people think of as the zombie apocalypse.

Byron Ballard:

It looks like the suburbs of Beirut, just fewer buildings. But then we got to the place we were headed and they said it’s right across from the post office. We got there, and it’s an old firehouse and the group of people who have organized that, a group of, I’m going to call them anarchists, that is a word close and dear to my heart, but they’re primitive skills experts and they do workshops in the area all the time. They had that thing set up so elegantly. So the first bay was missing persons. Second bay was first aid. After that, there was a section of clothing and a section of food and outside under 10 by 10 popups or thousands of cases of bottled water. And you pulled in differently if you were delivering versus picking up. The point is they had within hours of the disaster, they had organized that because they knew how to organize. So we at Mother Grove, goddess Temple are doing nothing, anybody. We’re not doing anything special. Everybody can do this, but you need to think about it now when you’re not in the grips of a crisis, it is possible to organize so that you get people what they need. But you need to think about it now because it is absolutely true that the first responders of any disaster are the people who are also the most effective victims, the disaster.

And we need to be ready for that because this is a warning shot the same way that Katrina was a warning shot, and we’re not going to get many more warning shots before the big huge cataclysm happens. We just simply aren’t. So I would say, and I’ve said this again and again, do the work. Do the damn work. Look at what your community needs and do it and do it and do it. And yes, it is exhausting. I mean, I look at your face and I know you look at my face, look at us, look at hanging out over your phone and we look tired because we aren’t tired, but we’re doing good work. So if people want to come to Mother Grave, goddess Temple, we are here. We will give you a cup of tea or a cup of coffee and a cookie and maybe some food, and then we may say, how much gas you got in your car? Can I give you money for gas? This stuff needs to go and I want to emphasize this. We are not special. Anybody can do this, but you just have to have the guts to do it, and you’ve got to get off your lazy ass and do something. Okay, I guess I’ll finish with that.

“Why is the Biden administration helping migrants and not hurricane victims?” You’ve no doubt heard this line, or some version of it, from your Facebook Uncle over the past two weeks. “Why is the government spending money on food stamps for drug addicts and not taking care of homeless vets?”

Rhetorical questions like these, drenched in faux-populist concern for the “average American,” have always been crowd-pleasers in conservative media and online circles, but their popular appeal is growing as climate chaos accelerates acute disasters and exposes the broken liberal state of the world’s ostensibly wealthiest country. As bridges fail, trains derail, disaster responses struggle to keep up, and infrastructure continues to erode, the very same forces that seek to gut the social state will turn to these failures—some real, some imagined—and exploit them to show how the priorities of liberalism are “anti-white” and anti-rural. 

None of it makes any sense; it’s draped in transparent cynicism and hypocrisy. But this doesn’t matter. What matters is that this line works, and liberals have failed to sufficiently build a media and political system that can counter it—a problem that will only get worse as climate chaos exposes the United States’ uniquely poor infrastructure and social welfare system. 

This talking point has become a full-blown Trump campaign focus in the last few weeks before the election. As dual hurricanes, Helene and Milton, destroyed much of the southeastern coast of the United States, Republicans didn’t even wait for the dead to be named and counted before exploiting the tragedy to attack immigrant communities. “A lot of the money that was supposed to go to Georgia and supposed to go to North Carolina and all of the others is going and has gone already,” former President Donald Trump told a crowd last Friday. “It’s been gone for people that came into the country illegally.” 

“Yes, they are literally using YOUR tax dollars to import voters and disenfranchise you! It is happening right in front of your eyes. And FEMA used up its budget ferrying illegals into the country instead of saving American lives. Treason,” Elon Musk insisted on Twitter. 

“There’s a bucket of money in FEMA that’s gone to illegal aliens and that’s somehow separate than the bucket of money that should by right go to American citizens,” JD Vance told Fox News’s Fox & Friends last week.

None of these claims, of course, are true. It’s simply a variation on an increasingly popular GOP attack line: feigning social welfare concerns for True Americans while claiming sinister minority groups or immigrants are soaking up free government cash. The most recent “Appalachian hurricane victims are left to die while migrants live high on the hog” meme comes after a similar lie, since debunked, was spread by Republicans last year, this time pitting “homeless vets” against migrants supposedly getting free housing. 

Thus far, liberals’ response to this line of attack—which we’ll call The Sudden, Selective Social Democrat Republican—has been to feign incredulity and fact check. Incredulity and fact checking are fine, and the White House was smart to quickly put up a website debunking the most outlandish of the lies, but not before they went viral and created a contagious thought meme that permeated online to millions of Americans. 

So how can liberals and leftists counter this seemingly effective talking point? A useful place to start would be to not point out Republican hypocrisy for its own sake, but orient this hypocrisy in contrast to a liberal vision of a more egalitarian, social welfare worldview for everyone—poor whites and poor migrants alike. 

Republican hypocrisy, make no mistake, is galling and worth noting. 

Trump, while president, sought to cut $271 million for FEMA disaster relief and redirect the money to “cracking down” on border enforcement. The Heritage Foundation and Project 2025— which Trump and his running mate Vance have championed, despite efforts to distance themselves from it—explicitly seeks to gut FEMA response capacity. As Ali Velshi documents at MSNBC, the authors of the Heritage foundation’s blueprint call for ““Privatizing … the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) National Flood Insurance Program, reforming FEMA emergency spending to shift the majority of preparedness and response costs to states and localities instead of the federal government, eliminating most of DHS’s grant programs.” The blueprint also says the federal government’s cost-sharing for disaster response should be reduced, which would be particularly burdensome for poor states.

Likewise, Republicans—chief among them then-President Trump—have sought to gut housing services for veterans and cut the budget of the Department of Veterans Affairs more broadly. 

The groups right-wing demagogues like Trump and Vance claim are being harmed by liberals shoveling money to immigrants are the exact same groups these demagogues routinely seek to cut services and support for. They’re the exact same groups the corporate-funded think tanks that will take over and run Trump’s policy priorities have spent decades disempowering, endangering, and polluting.  

But it can’t all be hypocrisy gotchas. While it may feel good to point out what naked phonies Trump and Co. are, doing so is no substitute for politics. There’s a fairly competent and well-funded center-left media industry that can do the work of pointing out both that Republicans are lying, and that they are totally full-of-shit, small, austerity-driven hypocrites. 

The next part––the hard part––is where liberals have more or less given up. Tales of widespread FEMA neglect are false. But Democrats countering Trump’s dark nativist vision with the politics of social welfare is a dream that more or less died when the Sanders campaign fizzled out in early Spring 2020. From de-industrialization to free trade ideology to sunsetting COVID-19 aid, Democratic leadership, with some exceptions, has proudly adopted the mantle of On Your Own politics, embracing austerity and free market dog-eat-dog capitalism. Add to this Democrats’ almost wholesale concession on the racist premises of immigration panic, and the ability to credibly combat The Sudden, Selective Social Democrat Republican becomes that much more difficult. From a messaging standpoint, Democrats’ defense of the Department of Homeland Security’s meager support for migrants is unconvincing when these same Democrats consistently frame migrants as little more than a burden on civilized society. 

Misdirecting populist anger toward vulnerable populations is, of course, not new. Peasant uprisings in 1848 Europe sometimes turned their ire away from the aristocrats and focused it on local Jewish communities. In his excellent book Revolutionary Spring: Europe Aflame and the Fight for a New World, historian Christopher Clark recites dozens of examples of local clergy and petit bourgeois redirecting popular anger towards the “other.” In revolutionary Galecia, he illustrates one example: prominent Polish-Armenian priest Karol Antoniewicz told the angry masses that the chief culprit for their ills was “the Jews” who, “like spiders, had wrapped the poor peasants in their web of immoral behaviour.” Antisemitic pogroms followed throughout central Europe, while the landed gentry watched in comfort and amusement from afar.  

But we can look to more recent examples to elucidate this point. Ronald Regean rose to popularity reciting a made-up story about a “welfare queen,” a Chicago woman who supposedly had “80 names,” “30 addresses,” and $150,000 a year in income from public coffers. And during his speeches throughout the South, while campaigning for the presidency in the 1970s, he made up an equally fictional “strapping young buck” using food stamps to “buy a T-Bone steak,” while “you were waiting in line to buy hamburger.”

Using immigrant scapegoats to channel justified—and sometimes unjustified—popular anger is as old as popular anger and immigrants. 

To an extent there’s only so much liberal-left messaging can do. Conservative media is sprawling, well-funded, and exists in its own alternative universe. They’ll use brain-dead fascistic claptrap to divide and conquer Americans no matter how economically populist Democrats become. 

But working to create a genuine social safety net, openly campaigning on universal, non-means-tested programs like single-payer healthcare and free higher education for all, would combat the image—not altogether unfounded—that Democrats are increasingly the party of only the highly educated and professional. Democrats have lost large swaths of the white working and middle class, and, increasingly, working and middle-class minorities. This is the logical outcome of (1) an overt pivot to Wall Street and neoliberal ideology (self-inflicted), and (2) the fact that Republicans just got better at exploiting racism (out of Democrats’ control). 

To combat fake populism requires not just hypocrisy dunks or fact checks—both of which are fine and true as far as they go—but a vision of actual populism, of a government that fights for and with the working class, whether they be migrants or born in the US, Black or white, rural or urban. These divisions are artificial constructs of class control, ones gleefully used by billionaire-funded Republicans. Liberals should work to erode them with a broad message of collective social welfare. This, more than any front-row-kid “fact check” or whining to the media refs, would inculcate Democrats from charges of abandoning disaffected working-class voters.

This story originally appeared in Truthout on Oct. 8, 2024. It is shared here with permission.

As Hurricane Milton barrels toward Florida, residents are bracing for their second catastrophic storm in less than two weeks. Since September 26, when Hurricane Helene made landfall in Florida’s Big Bend as a Category 4, communities across the Southeast have been grappling with the aftermath of that storm’s destruction. Among those hardest hit — and most overlooked — are farmworkers in southern Georgia.

The Georgia Department of Agriculture estimates that the storm has caused billions of dollars in damage to the state’s agriculture industry, affecting more than 100 farmers. Absent from many of these headlines, however, is Helene’s impact on the predominantly Latinx farmworker community, many of whom are undocumented or migrant workers with temporary visas. Ever since Hurricane Helene tore across Georgia, destroying pecan farms, poultry houses, cotton fields, and more, thousands of farmworkers have nowhere to turn as they grapple with decimated homes and lost livelihoods.

“I’ve been seeing pretty much every struggle that farmworkers experience in their daily lives, but magnified times 100,” said Alma Salazar Young, the UFW Foundation’s Georgia state director. “Everybody in South Georgia is struggling, especially in those really hard hit areas, but farmworkers are still an afterthought. Nobody has thought about going the extra mile to take care of them.”

Georgia is one of the top states employing migrant farmworkers through the federal H-2A program, which offers temporary visas for agricultural work. Before Hurricane Helene, living conditions for farmworkers in Georgia were already notoriously poor. The H-2A program requires employers to provide housing for their migrant workers that complies with the standards for temporary labor camps set by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. These standards, a legal expert noted, are already the bare minimum and have not been updated in decades. Still, they are often not met by employers; federal investigations have cited Georgia farms for mold and water damage, dangerous exposed wiring, and more.

Undocumented workers, meanwhile, rent their homes, usually single-wide trailers. Desperate for affordable housing, these workers also tend to be pushed into substandard conditions, including mobile homes riddled with holes in the siding and drywall, roof and faucet leaks, lightbulbs dangling from wires, pest infestations and front doors lacking locks, secured only by a rope. And that was before the storm. When Hurricane Helene hit, these shoddy structures stood little chance against 90 mile per hour gusts.

“Conditions for the workers were already terrible to begin with, but now, many of them don’t realize that they’re homeless,” said Young, who has been traveling to the various farmworker communities in South Georgia that have been impacted by Hurricane Helene. She has seen trailers with their roofs blown off, littered with debris and the floors caving in, while families still attempt to seek shelter in whatever remains.

The roughly 35,000 H-2A workers in Georgia, as well as an untold number of undocumented immigrants, are not eligible for disaster relief from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), nor do they qualify for food stamps or unemployment assistance.

The financial burden is exacerbated by the fact that many farmworkers already lived in extreme poverty before the hurricane. Minimum wage for H-2A workers in the state is $14.68, while undocumented workers often earn less — usually 10 to 12 dollars an hour, according to Young. If workers are paid by the piece — a basket of blueberries or a busload of watermelons, for instance — that hourly rate can be even more meager. Now, with fields and farms destroyed, it’s unclear when, if at all, workers will be able to return to earning a living.

Many agents that companies hire to recruit H-2A workers charge those workers illegal fees which the workers often pay by taking out crushing loans. If they’re unable to work, these workers will be unable to pay back that debt, on top of struggling to support themselves and their families. Visas for H-2A workers are also tied to one specific employer; if that employer no longer has work for them, they must return to their home countries, primarily Mexico, or risk being in violation of the law.

In the absence of government aid, local churches and groups like the Red Cross or Salvation Army are the only sources of relief for many of Georgia’s farmworkers. But these resources don’t come without barriers.

“Even before the storm hit, we were getting information on the storm, on shelters, and I would have to translate it before I could text it to our farmworker leaders, because it was not being provided in Spanish,” said Young. Sometimes information would be posted to Facebook groups that most farmworkers might not be familiar with, “so even if they do find out, they don’t find out about any type of assistance until it’s gone.”

Additionally, police officers and National Guard members have often been present at aid distribution sites, which dissuades undocumented workers from accessing those resources. In May, aiming to crack down on undocumented immigrants, Georgia passed House Bill 1105, which requires local law enforcement agencies to notify Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) if an arrested individual cannot provide documentation. Even though the Red Cross and other groups don’t ask for a name or ID, Young said that farmworkers are still afraid to show up: “They’re not going to risk getting deported over trying to get some food.”

In addition to food and water, farmworkers’ most requested items right now are diapers and baby formula. “They’re just trying to make it day by day,” Young said. “They haven’t had a chance to think about the future, while they’re trying to just figure out what they’re going to eat today.”

Immigrants form the bedrock of the country’s food supply, making up an estimated 73 percent of agriculture workers in the United States. Young joined the UFW Foundation after working as the director of Valdosta State University’s College Assistance Migrant Program, during which she witnessed firsthand what farmworkers sacrificed throughout the COVID-19 pandemic to put food on tables around the country.

“I’m just so disheartened by how little everybody in general cares about farmworkers, because during the pandemic, they risked their lives to bring food to everybody. Not just in several states, but all over the country,” Young said. “Now that they’re in need, we forgot about them.”

As the climate crisis intensifies, billions of poor and working people around the world are suffering from lack of regular (or any) access to clean water, but the dawn of “AI” is about to make the problem much worse. In their recent report for Context, “Forget jobs—AI is coming for your water,” Diana Baptista and Fintan McDonnell write, “Artificial intelligence lives on power and water, fed to it in vast quantities by data centres around the world. And those centres are increasingly located in the global south.” In Colón, a municipality in Central Mexico that is home to Microsoft’s first hyperscale data center campus in the country, working people are already bearing the environmental costs of man-made climate change, and they will be the ones to bear the costs of AI and Big Tech. “The town of 67,000 is suffering extreme drought. Its two dams have nearly dried up, farmers are struggling with dead crops, and families are relying on trucked and bottled water to fulfill their daily needs.”

In the latest installment of our ongoing series Sacrificed, Max speaks with Diana Baptista, a data journalist at the Thomson Reuters Foundation based in Mexico City, about Mexico’s ongoing water crisis and about the human and environmental costs of AI and cloud computing.

Additional links/info below…

• Diana’s Context author page and X page
• Fintan McDonnell & Diana Baptista, Context, “Forget jobs. AI is coming for your water (Video Report)”
• Fintan McDonnell & Diana Baptista, Context, “Thirsty data centres spring up in water-poor Mexican town (Text Report)”
• David Berreby, Yale Environment 360, “As use of A.I. soars, so does the energy and water it requires”
• Tamara Pearson, The Real News Network, “Indigenous Mexicans risk their lives to defend the environment from organized crime and ‘insatiable, predatory’ transnational corporations”
• Maximillian Alvarez, Working People / The Real News Network, “In Brazil, the climate crisis is already turning working people into climate refugees”
• Maximillian Alvarez, Working People / The Real News Network, “East Palestine residents have been left behind—and they’re running out of water”

Permanent links below…

• Leave us a voicemail and we might play it on the show!
• Labor Radio / Podcast Network website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• In These Times website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• The Real News Network website, YouTube channel, podcast feeds, Facebook page, and Twitter page

Featured Music…
Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

Studio Production: Max Alvarez
Post-Production: Jules Taylor

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Diana Baptista:

Hello, I’m Diana Baptista. I’m a data journalist for the Thomson Reuters Foundation context, and I’m based in Mexico City.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right, welcome everyone to another episode of Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Brought to you in partnership with In These Times magazine and The Real News Network produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast network. If you’re hungry for more worker and labor focus shows like ours, follow the link in the show notes and go check out all the other great shows in our network and please support the work that we’re doing here at Working People because we can’t keep going without you. Share our episodes with your coworkers, your friends and family members. Leave positive reviews of the show on Spotify and Apple Podcasts and reach out to us if you have recommendations for working folks you’d like us to talk to or subjects you’d like us to investigate and please support the work we do at The Real News Network by going to therealnews.com/donate, especially if you want to see more reporting from the front lines of struggle around the US and across the world.

My name is Maximillian Alvarez and today we’ve got another critical installment of our ongoing sacrificed series where we are speaking with people, working and living in industrial government run and climate sacrifice zones around the US and beyond where we investigate the root causes and the connections between sacrifice communities and where we talk seriously about what we can do about it. In the description of a recent video report titled, Forget Jobs. AI is Coming for Your Water, Diana Baptista and Fenton McDonald write: “Artificial intelligence lives on power and water fed to it in vast quantities by data centers around the world, and these centers are increasingly located in the global south.” One estimate from the University of California, Riverside says AI’s total water demand by 2027 could be more than half the total annual water withdrawal of the United Kingdom, but all we really have are estimates.

Big tech firms have been secretive about the amount of public water used by individual data centers, and up to half of all data centers don’t even measure how much water they use. According to one survey, a municipality of Mexico City and Central Mexico is home to Microsoft’s first hyperscale data center campus in the country. The town of 67,000 is suffering extreme drought. Its two dams have nearly dried up. Farmers are struggling with dead crops, and families are relying on trucked and bottled water to fulfill their daily needs. Mexico leveraging its proximity to the US is hoping to convince big tech to nearshore their facilities. Here, the state of Quero is offering favorable land loans, cheap electricity in a pool of local talent. Similar stories are playing out around the world. In Uruguay, Google admitted that a planned data center in Montevideo would require 7.6 million liters of drinking water per day.

While the country was suffering a historic three year drought in the United States, a bill has been introduced in the Senate to compel big tech to reveal the environmental impacts of AI after reports of conflict over water between farmers and big tech in the desert of Arizona. So that’s what we’re going to be discussing today, and I could not be more honored to have Diana Baptista on the show with us. Diana is, as you heard, a data journalist at the Thomason Reuters Foundation. She’s based in Mexico City, and you can find a link to the vital video report that she produced with Fenton McDonald for context, a media platform created by the Thomason Reuters Foundation in the show notes for this episode. And if you haven’t already, I highly recommend that you watch the report and follow all the important work that Diana and her colleagues are doing over at context, but we’re going to have a conversation here that hopefully will encourage you to go watch the report if you haven’t already, because you really, really should.

And Diana, thank you so much for joining me today, and thank you so much for doing this important work. I was really excited to learn about it, although I was horrified to learn what you found in reporting this stuff. And so I want to dig into all of this, but I guess before we really dig into the meat of this particular story, I wanted to ask if we could start with a sort of zoomed out context here for the water crisis that is going on in Mexico and has been going on for some time. I mean, I remember as a grad student in Mexico City, like everybody else, I was getting my water and those big jugs people in our buildings were getting them delivered twice a week or you’d walk to the corner shop and carry back these heavy, expensive bottles of purified water while the stuff coming out of your taps was not fit to drink. So for folks who are listening to this who maybe don’t know about how bad the water crisis in Mexico is, I was wondering if you could just sort of give us some context there. How bad is it?

Diana Baptista:

First of all, thank you, Maximilian. It’s such a pleasure to be in this podcast. Thank you so much for the invitation. So yeah, let’s talk about Mexico. So we have drinking water. We have taps in 99% of the country. However, this is not drinking water. We don’t put a glass of water and drink from it. It all comes from bottles and the water we collect to drink afterwards. And this is because of several issues with infrastructure that have been going on for decades now. And one of the main issues we’re having right now in Mexico is drought. We have had several rain seasons that have been irregular. Our dams are not filling up, and this is all around the country except the southern part of the country, but most of it is just drying up. And the truth is that we’ve come completely dependent to water bottle companies and all these big soda companies.

So what we are drinking as a population, everything comes from plastic and everything comes from soda. It’s a very sad reality that we have been facing for decades now here in Mexico. And because of the drought. For example, in Mexico City this year, we were very close of reaching day zero, which is the day that the dams have been completely empty and there is no more left for consumption. This has happened in other parts of the world like South Africa. They’ve overcome it and we really didn’t have any plan to overcome it. There were several plans of infrastructure and stuff, but the only way we survived that was thanks to the rain, it rained finally. It has been raining quite intensely, and it was just luck. We got lucky this rain season and it has been raining otherwise, perhaps we would’ve reached day zero for Mexico City, and that means around 20 million people without access to water.

So very serious stuff. And we focused on our investigation on a place that is north of Mexico City. It’s around three hours away. That is called Quero. And for many years this has been a semi deserter and it has been struggling with tremendous drought. This means that at least for three years, rain seasons have been irregular. Dams are almost completely empty. If you go there, everything is yellow, everything feels dry. And the sun with the heat waves, we have been getting, it has been horrible up there. And while people are dependent more than ever on water bottle companies at the moment, so one of the main issues we have in Mexico as well is unequal water distribution. So this means that this big and bottled water companies are located in these places with extreme drought and most of the water is being allocated to them. So our public water, our public resources are going to these companies so they can sell water to us in the form of plastic. And activists for many years now have been fighting this around the country because this is for soda, for bottled water and for beer and a lot of beer that’s getting exported to the United States, for example. So activists have been very angry for many years denouncing that this water inequality is just very hard on the population.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I want to circle back to that in the end when we sort of connect this story in Mexico that you’ve reported on to the other stories that we’ve been reporting on in this sacrificed series and kind of how what you’re describing is really the future that lies in store for so many of us. And that future is already here for towns like East Palestine, Ohio, where people are still living off of bottled water. So I want to end up there, but let’s kind of stay in Colon for a minute and talk about what it was like for you to really start digging into this story and what you were learning about Microsoft’s plans for this massive campus in Cologne, a municipality that’s already experiencing extreme drought.

Diana Baptista:

Of course. So this was all burned. This all came from the fact that Thom from the Thomson Reuters Foundation, we had been investigating the expansion of data centers in the global south. And we had been reading that a lot of them were coming to Mexico, and suddenly Microsoft made this big announcement saying, we have invested billions in the state of Carrero and we’re opening up this hyperscale cloud region, which we’re not very sure yet what it means, but it came with billions of dollars of investment and it was a huge announcement. It even reached the president. The president was very happy about this investment. So we looked at Rero and wondered, oh, we know data center stick water. We know there’s not enough data on how much water they take, but there have been a lot of battles around the global south when these data centers come to town.

And we were very interested in the fact that from Carrero, we heard nothing but silence. We weren’t hearing the activists, we weren’t hearing the protests. So we wondered, is nobody looking at Carrero? What’s happening there? So we decided to make the trip up there to Cologne. The colon is this very large municipality. So you have a lot of in cologne, you have car manufacturers and you have agriculture and you have chickens and meat and protein industry. And then you have these very small towns hidden in the mountains that are the ones who small farmers and people living off tourism actually live. And they’re among the most vulnerable population in our country. So we went up there and Quero has always had a problem because of all the water that goes to the industry, you have these huge industrial parks among these yellowed hills where everything you see is dry and a lot of water is being taken by the industry.

And it’s such a stark contrast from where you’d expect big industry to grow. And then we went to this little towns in the municipality of cologne. There must be around 50 minutes away from where all the industrial parks with the data centers are located. And over there we saw people really struggling. We went to a community that is called Lare, and this is an indigenous community. Most people are very small farmers. They have very small restaurants that has no electricity, they have no tap water there. They bring their own water and water jugs, and they live of tourism from every weekend. People would go from Mexico City or from Carrero capital to that little town and just spend a couple days next to the dam in the water, eat and go back home. So that’s what the people live off. But when we went there, the dams were almost completely empty. There was nobody there. We went there on Father’s Day, which is supposed to be one of the most active days, and there was a lot of music. There were people, but after a couple of hours, everybody left and the businesses were all empty. So we saw people had nobody to sell their fish to or their produce. Nobody was doing water sports, they weren’t eating at the restaurants. It just felt very lonely. Where this town’s life is around water. When there’s no water, everything just dies around it.

Maximillian Alvarez:

As the water protectors have famously burned onto our memories, water is life and without water, there’s no life. And that’s really the direction that we’re heading in. I mean, how more basically can we put it here? And I want to kind of drill down on this point because I know as you guys say in the report, and as I mentioned in the introduction, it’s actually hard to determine how much water these data centers and big tech in general are using. But we know that that usage has spiked since the introduction of AI products like Chat, GPT. And there’s an article by Yale’s E 360 that I’ll include in the show notes for this episode that reads, according to a recent study by Ren, Google’s data centers used 20% more water in 2022 than they did in 2021. And Microsoft’s water use rose by 34% in the same period. Google data centers host its Barred chatbot and other generative ais. Microsoft Servers host chat GPT as well as its bigger siblings, GPT-3 and GPT-4. All three are produced by open AI in which Microsoft is a large investor. So Diana, could you just flesh this out a little more for folks, how the introduction of so-called AI has played into this story and how much water usage we’re really talking about here?

Diana Baptista:

I mean, this has been quite an adventure to try to figure out how much water is being used. So when we first heard that data centers were coming to Queretaro and we’re talking about the three big companies, so we had announcements by Microsoft, Google, and Amazon for billions of dollars coming to this little town without water. So the first thing we did was ask. We asked the companies, can you tell us how much water, how many data center units you have first in the state and how many you’re planning to build and how much water they will take? Microsoft kept telling us they had no spokesperson that could give us information. Amazon gave us some explanation that the tech they’re going to use is very new, doesn’t take water, but they wouldn’t go into detail because of industrial secrecy and all that. And Google just said they’re bringing down the water usage.

So we didn’t get answers. From there, we decided to ask the government, the local government who has been doing a major push to bring these data centers to town. So we have Governor Mauricio Kuri from the first day he was appointed as governor, he traveled to Washington DC to meet with Amazon people to try to convince them to bring their data centers to Carrero. So from day one, it has been a priority of the local government to bring them. And when I spoke to the Secretary of Sustainable Development, Marco Elte, who is one of the main figures bringing the data centers to town, he said he didn’t have the figures because he’s not the water commission, so he doesn’t allocate the water. But he also gave me some very weird numbers saying that the data centers in Quero take the same amount of water as a hotel room with 55 rooms or the same as a restaurant in 30 days.

But he wouldn’t say where these estimations came from. Very weird estimations to begin with, which meant he must have known how many gallons, at least one unit is taken. But then he said he didn’t know. So we felt we kept being played around. There was such huge capacity in the public and in the private sector, we asked the National Water Commission, and they only told us that they haven’t allocated any new concessions to any new companies in Carrera. But one thing about Mexico that is one of the roots of our water crisis is that at some point in our history, the National Water Commission gave away a lot of concessions to a lot of private people and a lot of private companies. And the way our law works is that they can sell that concession. So Maximilian, you may have owned an entire aquifer, for example, and you decide to sell it to Microsoft and you don’t have to ask anybody about this, you just tell the water commission.

You did that and that’s it. So people who owned these concessions have been selling to the industry in a way that then the public has no say in it. You have no voice in it because it’s a private thing between particulars and then the public is left without water and you don’t even know who sold it to whom. So it’s been, I don’t know, it’s very bureaucratic, but also a lot of opacity on how these concessions are being sold. And the National Water Commission told us that that’s how Microsoft got one of its commissions. It got sold to them by somebody who already owned one, which is very grave, right? Because then it allows for absolutely zero accountability. So once we had this information, we tried to figure out on our own how much water these data centers were taken. We went to public databases for the National Water Commission, and we couldn’t find anything because this information is no longer public once it belongs to a private company or you don’t know who is selling to whom.

So we were left in the dark. Companies refuse to tell this information. Local government said they didn’t have the information, which we found was ridiculous. And then you have local activists that for many, many years have been fighting for equal distribution of water in Quero, but they were also left in the dark. There are very small group to begin with who have been asking in the last month, in recent months have been asking the secretary like, Hey, can you tell us how much water these data centers are going to take? And he always says that, don’t worry about this. These data centers do not take a lot of water. They cannot come to Carrera because there’s no water to begin with, so we cannot give them more water. They’re super efficient data centers, but then we’re already left in the dark about how this technology operates, this super, supposedly super efficient new data centers that do not require water.

We don’t know how they work. We have no way to prove that they are actually water efficient, that they require zero water. We just have to take everything at face value, everything that the local government and the companies tell you. And activists actually found out from context about the concession bought by Microsoft. So it has been very difficult to figure this out. And when Finon reached out to some international experts that have been doing this estimations of how much water this data centers take around the world, they told us the same thing. There’s no data on data centers. They have to rely on certain estimations and certain methodologies they have developed by themselves, but there is nothing certain. And it has been very frustrating trying to figure it out and trying to do the estimations by yourselves when nobody is cooperating, nobody’s giving you any numbers to start up from. So it makes a journalist job very difficult. But we also see it makes the activist jobs very difficult because then we have no certainty and no possibility for accountability.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I think that’s really beautifully and powerfully put. And again, I want to encourage everyone listening to this to go watch the report itself because Diana and Fenton dig into this a lot more there. And Diana, I just wanted to ask just to make sure that folks are keeping up with us. You guys talk a bit about what the hell they’re using the water for, but can you just give us the basics there? Why do these data centers need so much water and why does AI demand so much water?

Diana Baptista:

Of course, it comes down to cooling. These data centers get very, very hot from all the computing, from all the computing processing it requires. It gets very hot inside a data center unit. So they can use two things, either electricity or water to cool off a data center. So you will hear information sometimes from a company saying that they have become super water efficient and they do not require fresh drinking water, which is the kind of water they need. They don’t need recycled water. They need fresh drinking water to cool down their huge computers, so using electricity. But the experts we have spoken to have also estimated how much water a country needs to power. Its electricity that powers the data centers. So no process for a data center is water free to begin with. Everything requires water. So of course they may come to Reta and say, all we’re going to need is electricity, but in the end, the power plants are also running on water.

So Queretaro needs water to run these power plants to run data centers. So in the end, everything needs water. So that becomes kind of tricky to understand. What does AI have to do with this? First of all, most of the data centers that are coming to Mexico are for the cloud for storing our images and our memes, our thousand on red emails and everything like this. The secretary, when I spoke to him, he said this was the industry of the future that everything we would need as humans would be cloud storage. And that quero would be so much stronger by become a data center valley because the world wouldn’t need our services. Which tells us a lot about balancing the creation of jobs with the depletion of our natural resources and ai. Yes, as these AI systems grow, these companies are also looking to the global south to locate their data centers.

And experts told us this is for different reasons. First of all, because local governments are giving them incentives. So water is cheap, electricity is cheap. In Creta, we found out they’re even giving some of them free land. We found a contract that the Congress approved this huge land to be giving to cloud HQ for a data center. There’s a pool of local talent that as we know in the global south, you pay less than you would in the north. And then you have all these local governments that are not asking questions. So we were very skeptical when the secretary told us he wouldn’t know how much water would be allocated to the data centers because we imagine when they traveled to Washington DC to talk to these companies, they must have discussed this, it must have come up. How much water are you going to use? What are your estimates? What is the technology you’re using? So I don’t want to think they’re not even discussing this or they’re not even thinking about these questions. They’re just telling them, come and bring your money. So these are the two technologies that are using these data centers, AI and cloud storage.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I mean, I have so many thoughts and questions about this, but I know how busy you are and I can’t keep you for two hours. But I mean it’s so wild to think that it was less than a hundred years ago in 1938 when La Ena nationalized famously the oil industry in Mexico, thus really representing a sort of different governmental mentality and how Mexico was approaching its collective ownership over its own resources. And we’ve had a long kind of windy up and down sort of road from there to here. The government doesn’t even know, is not tracking all this water that’s being promised to these private companies from Silicon Valley. And the sales that are being made are sort of passing through private hands in a way that just sort of really shows you, I think the trajectory of the past century in a state like Mexico and what the kind of privatization, neoliberal and all those big historical forces, what they translate to 80, 90 years later in everything that you and I are talking about here.

But you and I will have to have a follow-up discussion, breaking all that down because there’s a whole lot to dig into there that we don’t have time to now. But I wanted to kind of bring it back to the working people living and working in this area because normally whether it’s the Quila, Dores on the border or these other sort of incentives that states and local governments give to industries to try to bring them them to Mexico, big promises like, oh, it’s going to mean jobs. It’s going to mean economic prosperity for the people here and the people here can provide their labor and expertise in cheaper quantities than you could get north of the border. All that stuff. I wanted to ask, is that even a thing? It feels like, and you guys touch on this in your reporting, the average working person A doesn’t even know that this is happening, let alone how it’s going to impact them, and B, they’re sure shit not going to benefit from it. So could you talk a bit about that, what this all looks like or doesn’t look like through the eyes of local working people in colon. Colon?

Diana Baptista:

One thing, colon is going to be a victim of its own success because you had this deserted area that suddenly it’s becoming the data center valley and you had all these other industries. So you’re attracting a lot of people that are not even from colon. So we’re talking people with master’s or PhD degrees, highly educated people that are not living in small towns of fishermen and people relying on tourism. They’re living in the cities, so they’re bringing these data centers and they’re not even promising that many jobs to begin with. The secretary recognized like 2000 direct jobs, which is very little, to be honest, for such a huge 20 billion investment, 2000 jobs are not a lot. He was mainly excited about indirect jobs and suppliers and stuff like that. So you’re attracting all these people from the cities. So it’s three hours away from Mexico City.

You have these highly educated people traveling from Mexico City or from Queretaro Capital a couple of hours into colon for these data centers and then traveling back. So these are not people from colon to begin with because colon is a series of small towns of fishermen and small farmers and restauranters people with limited educational background, the most vulnerable inner country, the ones that are always left behind because you have to travel, I don’t know, five hours by car to reach LASA community. And you only go there to see the dam and take a little ride on a boat and then travel back to Mexico City. So these are abandoned people to begin with. So we were very interested to see what they thought about this. And I mean, it was funny because you ask them, do you know what an AI is to begin with? Do you know what the cloud is? And for example, 70-year-old Mr. Gu Hernandez who has this blackberry patch of land, he would be like, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t know what AI is.

And what’s interesting is he was very knowledgeable about water inequality. He was very angry telling me he hates that industry comes and that he does not have enough water for his blackberries and that he has to see them die. Meanwhile, he can see these big industries coming to town. So he is aware of what’s happening. He’s just not aware of what AI is. He doesn’t have a phone, he has no idea about cloud storage or anything like that. So it felt like things were happening around him that he was completely unaware of, but also that he was feeling the effect of, so he knew there is new tech, he knew they were coming to town and they would take a lot of water. And the only way he could relate to that was because his blackberries were dying and because it hadn’t rained in two years.

And he showed me how the heat waves burned to them and they were all yellowed and they couldn’t grow because there wasn’t enough water for his crops. We went to this small restaurant next to the dam that received all the stories from year to year. And again, the same story. These are very old people who have no idea about technology, but that will tell you about how water inequality is affecting them and how they find it unfair that the priority is given to the industry instead of them and that they have to have water once a week. So for example, we spoke to this woman who owns a small restaurant next to a dam. The restaurant has no electricity, it has no tap water, so she has to bring everything from her house. So she gets water in her house every eight days. She fills all these water jugs and she carries them on her back all the way to her restaurant. And that’s how she kind of survives the entire week in her restaurant. And yeah, she will tell you she has no idea what AI is, but she knows that she’s struggling and that her business will not survive because there is drought and she doesn’t know the drought is related to the industry. She doesn’t know if these companies are taking the water from her. She does know that new industry coming means she will get less water because of water inequality. That’s a stamp that we have in Mexico because that is how the country operates.

Maximillian Alvarez:

This sadly and morbidly kind of is where your path and mind connected, right on the kind of journalistic quests that we are on to investigate these stories that over here through our podcast we’ve been investigating by talking to working folks, living in sacrifice zones, which is exactly what you were just doing and describing, right? I mean, we may not call it that, but that is what is happening, where the lives and livelihood and the conditions for life itself are being sacrificed at the altar of corporate greed and corporate profits and technological progress that is defined by big tech companies and their supporters in government. And those things become the priorities for government policy. They become the priorities in terms of where our collective resources are being allocated, like water that we all need to live. But that’s where it really does feel to be just intimately connected to what we’ve been investigating here, talking to folks living 20 minutes from where I’m sitting in South Baltimore, black and brown and white working class communities that have been poisoned for generations by rail cars that are blowing coal dust everywhere, trash incinerator, medical incinerator that are just burning up all this stuff and spewing it into the air.

The folks living in east Palestinian, Ohio where that train derailed two years ago or almost two years ago, and they were exposed to all those chemicals and they didn’t know what was on those trains either. They didn’t know the sort of inner workings of the rail industry, but they sure as shit paid the price for all of that when one of those bomb trains derailed in their own backyard. And so I guess I wanted to just sort of take everything that we’ve been discussing here and sort of bring Mexico and places like colon Colon into this discussion of sacrifice zones and what it means to have our societies sacrificing whole communities for the sake of private corporations and serving their needs above ours and what that looks like, right? I mentioned earlier that I wanted us to end up here because when we were talking about the fact that people living in Mexico, everyone gets their water through bottles and these water bottling companies have such a stranglehold on this vital natural resource.

And I think you see something in Mexico that still seems very foreign to a lot of people here in the us, but it’s becoming increasingly less foreign, which is like, what does it look like when I can no longer trust the water coming out of my tap and I have to live on bottled water? If you’ve never done that, trust me when I say it’s a real pain in the ass, it’s a real sort of dystopian reality that folks in East Palestine have talked to us about on this very show. And that’s not something to strive for, but it feels like a reality that we’re just accepting both in areas of the global south that have been experiencing this for years, but also the global working class population. This just feels like the direction that we’re all heading in. So I guess I just wanted to sort of ask, doing this research and this reporting on these data centers, and I guess what do you think this necessarily adds to what our listeners here are hearing when we’re talking to sacrifice communities here in the United States?

Because it’s really important that folks see that it’s not just happening here. In fact, it’s been happening in the global south for a long time and what’s been happening there is coming back home or it’s been happening at home in the global south sides of our population, the poor, black, brown indigenous communities that have been living under these circumstances as well. So I just kind of wanted to give you sort of a last word there, what this has all taught you about that and how the kind of sacrifice zone question, what that looks like when we look at it through the lens of Mexico and stories like the one that you’ve been reporting on.

Diana Baptista:

Thank you. That’s a great question. I mean, the first thing that comes to my mind is balance. So this government is making a push to bring Nearshoring to push for Nearshoring in Mexico. They want to tech companies to come to the country because we need more jobs because we have all this pool of highly educated people who need a job and we need all these communities outside of Mexico City to grow. We need more investment. We need to grow economically as a country, but at what cost is that cost, the natural resources, the dwindling natural resources of the country? And where’s the accountability? I mean, for me, the most frustrating part was this opacity from government and companies because maybe it could be the data centers will not take one ounce of water. That could be the truth. But if it’s so, why won’t they tell us?

Why won’t they respond to requests of information? Why will they not give interviews when they’re being requested? Why activists had no idea that there had been a purchase from Microsoft, from somebody who already had a concession. They were in the dark about this. And it’s very frustrating for us to be kept in the dark because then maybe the local government does have good intentions and maybe companies will do some good in the country, but we cannot know that for sure because they’re running on opacity. And that is incredibly frustrating because it also tells us that there’s a lack of regulation in the country for this kind of tech to grow. So we know AI systems will need more data centers, we’ll need more computing power, and they are looking at the global south, especially Latin America for this. But when they come to our countries, why do they come with so much secretiveness?

Why won’t they release the information? Why won’t they be open about their data? So we’ve been told this is because of industry secrecy and stuff, but that’s not enough. That’s not enough for a population who’s already running out of water. There has to be a better effort from companies government to let us know what is being done with our resources. So for me, that was the main lesson that it’s going to be very hard for these tech companies to progress in the global south if they do it with opacity and they do it without releasing the data. We saw it in your way, for example, in Montevideo activists pushed until they got the information and then they refused the data center by Google. And Google has had to change its plans in Montevideo. We saw it in Chile as well with this wonderful story by Rust World.

And we’re seeing it in several parts. Brazil is one of the main markets for data centers in Latin America, for example, where we saw this data, and this has been very frustrating. This has been my main frustration while conducting this investigation. And the second part of it is that we didn’t see that the arrival of new technology to Quero was going to mean any change for the most vulnerable workers in the country. So yes, maybe we attract more highly educated people to this data centers, but in the end, the small farmers and the fishermen and the lady who has no electricity and cooks once in a while for a tourist or two that come into town, they will be just as vulnerable as before. Their income will not change, their opportunities will not change. And all they’re seeing is their environment changing against ’em, which is very sad because one would hope that the arrival of this new companies and all this investment would mean change for the better, for the country’s most vulnerable. But we have not seen that happen yet. So it does leaves us wondering again, where’s the balance? Where’s the balance between economic growth and equality and the protection of our environment? We were very sad to see that there was no data, no answers, and no real change for people who are most vulnerable.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us this week. I want to thank our amazing guest, Diana Baptista for talking with me today. And I want to thank her for all the important work that she is doing. Be sure to follow Diana’s work and follow the link in the show notes to watch Diana’s video report. Forget Jobs AI is Coming for Your Water, which she and Fenton McDonald produced for context, a media platform created by the Thomason Reuters Foundation. And you can read the full text report as well, which we’ve also linked in the show notes for this episode. And as always, I want to thank you all for listening, and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see you all back here next week for another episode of Working People. And if you can’t wait that long, then go subscribe to our Patreon and check out the awesome bonus episodes that we’ve published there for our patrons over the years and go explore all the great work that we’re doing at The Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism, lifting up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle.

Sign up for the Real News newsletter so you never miss a story. And help us do more work like this by going to the real news.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. It really makes a difference. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.

This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Aug. 26, 2024. It is shared here with permission under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.

Police and soldiers from Uganda’s U.S.-trained army cracked down on demonstrators at two Monday protests against the East African Crude Oil Pipeline, continuing the globally condemned oppression of EACOP opponents.

In the capital city of Kampala, where protesters tried to march on Parliament and the Chinese Embassy “there are 21 people arrested, they included 19 males and two females,” defense attorney Samuel Wanda told Agence France-Presse. They were taken to the city’s central police station and charging details were not yet available. Eight protesters would be directly impacted by the project.

As AFP noted, the China National Offshore Oil Corporation has an 8% stake in EACOP, which is set to carry crude nearly 900 miles from Uganda’s Lake Albert oilfields to the port of Tanga in Tanzania. Ugandan and Tanzanian state-owned companies each have a 15% stake, and the remaining 62% is controlled by the France-based multinational TotalEnergies.

“The arrest of Stop EACOP activists in Kampala today is an attack on democracy and the right to protest,” said climate campaigner and environmental consultant Ashley Kitisya on social media. “We condemn this crackdown and call for the immediate release of all detained activists. Peaceful voices demanding justice must not be silenced. #StopEACOP.”

Fridays for Future Uganda declared that “the arrest of climate activists against EACOP is a blatant move to silence crucial advocates for change.”

“Many affected are misled and unaware of the true risks,” the youth-led group added. “We must oppose this injustice and demand EACOP’s immediate halt to protect people and the environment.”

Hundreds of peaceful pipeline opponents—including breastfeeding mothers—also gathered in Hoima City, according to the Kampala-based Monitor. They were at a Kitara Secondary School (SS) and planned to demonstrate at regional EACOP offices but “were surrounded by heavily armed police” and Uganda Peoples’ Defence Forces (UPDF) soldiers “who foiled the protest.”

As the outlet noted last year, declassified U.S. State Department data shows that from 2019-21, Uganda received $8.5 million in military training assistance from the United States, and from 2012-16, the African country got grants for equipment worth $21.9 million .

On Monday, Christopher Opio told Hoima Resident City Commissioner Badru Mugabi that the project affected persons (PAPs) he represents had not received a government response to an April petition “so, we decided to say we can again put our concerns in writing. Today, we were taking our petition to the offices of EACOP, and Petroleum Authority of Uganda (PAU) peacefully.”

As the Monitor detailed:

Mugabi responded saying: “If you have a court case and the court has not heard you, please come to our offices. We shall put these courts to order, or we shall appeal to their supervisors. But walking to these offices will not change the status quo legally.”

Later, Mugabi selected a few PAPs’ representatives and escorted them to deliver their petition to the offices of EACOP and PAU while the rest of the aggrieved locals were left at Kitara SS under tight security.

In a series of social media posts, the StopEACOP campaign called out law enforcement for blocking the peaceful protest in Hoima, highlighting the threats and intimidation faced by PAPs and local climate activists.

Despite the oppression in Uganda, protests are planned in Tanzania on Thursday, according to the global climate organization 350.org.

“The EACOP project threatens local communities, water resources, biodiversity, and efforts to curb climate change while providing little to benefit ordinary Ugandan and Tanzanian people,” the group said Monday. “Already, tens of thousands of people along the pipeline’s route and near its associated oil drilling sites have been forcibly displaced, losing their land, livelihoods, and traditional ways of life. Many have been relocated to inadequate homes on infertile land, making it impossible to grow crops or sustain their families. Others have received inadequate compensation or none at all, leaving them unable to rebuild their lives.”

“Additionally, community members and activists face escalating threats, including violence, intimidation, arrests, harassment, and even abductions for resisting the project,” 350 added. “Impacted communities and land, human rights, and environmental defenders in the project’s host countries are taking to the streets to demand an end to EACOP and justice for the harm that has already been caused.”

The climate crisis is intensifying every year. From deadly, record-breaking heatwaves and forest fires to rising sea levels, the devastating impacts of man-made climate change are being felt across the globe. But you would hardly know there was a crisis after watching the 2024 Democratic National Convention. TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with Collin Rees, political director at Oil Change US, about the shocking lack of urgency on addressing the climate emergency at the DNC in Chicago.

Videography: Kayla Rivara
Post-Production: Adam Coley

Transcript

Collin Rees:  I’m Colin Rees, Political Director at Oil Change US.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Colin, thanks so much for talking to me, man. It’s been a wild week. We are here on Thursday, Aug. 22, the Democratic National Convention has officially ended. Kamala Harris has formally accepted the nomination, and now it’s a full-on sprint to the general election.

I wanted to talk to you specifically because it felt, to me, very obvious that one of the most absent issues throughout the course of this week is the climate. And of course, on the Republican side at the RNC, they’re calling climate change a total hoax. This is just old jazzy standards of the right. I guess, how did you feel looking back on the week about how much climate change and climate policy was addressed, or wasn’t, this week?

Collin Rees:  I thought it was a huge missed opportunity. I think there is no question that the Democratic Party is better than the Republicans on climate, but I think the key problem there is that better than the Republicans is the lowest bar imaginable. That’s not going to get it done.

And so I think, in particular, the way the presidential election has unfolded, the lack of a real primary, the substitution of Kamala Harris, hasn’t allowed for that richer discussion that we need, raising the bar on what’s needed on climate. And I think that’s concerning from a climate policy standpoint, but it’s also a deep political vulnerability.

If Kamala is not able to or willing to put out a bold climate platform, be specific about what she’s going to do to phase out fossil fuels and build out renewable energy, that could very much hurt her. Youth voters care deeply about this, voters on the front lines of extraction and of climate impacts care deeply about this issue, and so I think it’s a really missed opportunity.

Maximillian Alvarez:  And I want to ask if you could just underscore for folks out there watching and listening where we are with the climate crisis right now, because it’s the thing that people love to put out of sight, out of mind, as the planet continues to warm, as the world continues to break apart into something we are not prepared for. So, from your vantage point, where are we right now with the climate crisis, and how does that square with the apparent lack of urgency here at the Democratic National Convention and in this election in general?

Collin Rees:  Max, vibes are bad. We are not in a good place on the climate crisis. And in particular, we have seen, this is the hottest year on record. We are breaking temperature records several days in a row in July, I believe. We’re seeing flooding in Connecticut and other places across the country. We have Hurricane Beryl hitting the Gulf Coast. Wildfire is starting out West again. These climate impacts are here to stay and they’re only getting worse.

I think the other really dangerous thing that happens when you have this lack of discussion at the DNC, for instance, is that space is not just left empty in a vacuum, that space is filled by actors like ExxonMobil, by actors like oily Texas Democrats who would like to delay and deny climate action, block climate action.

I think there is this prevailing sense in the media in particular, the mainstream media, that the IRA was passed, the Inflation Reduction Act under Joe Biden, we’ve done some of the things on climate, and so there’s not a need to focus anymore. That couldn’t be further from the truth.

Not only was that, at best, a down payment on the climate action that we need, but some of the deeply irresponsible and dangerous trade-offs that were made in the IRA are coming to fruition and are starting to boost the fossil fuel industry, starting to give it new life.

You have false solutions like carbon capture and storage, dirty hydrogen. These things the fossil fuel industry is using to cling to its existence by continuing fossil fuel production, doubling down on oil and gas expansion, and its political existence as well.

The idea that you can continue to have a fossil fuel industry as long as you suck carbon out of the air, these fanciful, unbelievably expensive ideas where the technology doesn’t even exist, set that all aside for a moment. The main point from the lobby industry, from the fossil fuel industry’s side, is that they’re still in the room.

They’re still making these decisions about climate policy. They’re still hosting and sponsoring panels on the sidelines of the DNC despite donating vastly more to Republicans than to Democrats. They just want to stay in the conversation, they just want to stay afloat to continue that private profit greed machine, and I think that’s one of the less talked about things when you don’t have the proper discussion that you should on climate.

Maximillian Alvarez:  And as far as the climate justice movement is concerned, what would a bold climate platform look like? And from your perspective as someone who covers this day in, day out, what is it going to actually take to get there?

Collin Rees:  It’s going to take political will. The science is extremely clear on this. We have a lot of the tools. A lot of those tools are actually executive branch tools, too. The President can do this. We certainly need Congress to come along, and that would be great, but there’s so much that Kamala can do just by herself.

Where we’re at right now is that we are seeing major gains in renewable energy. That’s great. Wind and solar are coming along. They could be faster, and they need to be, but we’re getting there.

What we’re not seeing is a corresponding phase out of fossil fuels. Or, even barring that, we’re not even seeing an end to fossil fuel expansion. The first step is to stop digging when you’re in a hole, and we’re not even doing that.

So what we really need to see specific action on is to constrain that expansion of the fossil fuel industry and to start to phase it out. That’s a few things. It’s taking the Biden pause on new LNG export authorizations and making it permanent, saying, we will not be issuing new export authorizations for LNG.

It’s rejecting the Dakota access pipeline. People don’t necessarily know this, this is DAPL, this is the pipeline that was bravely resisted by the Standing Rock Sioux during late Obama years. It was approved by Trump, but it was approved illegally, and the judge has said that. He sent it back to the Department of the Interior and it’s sitting on their desk right now waiting to be approved or not. That pipeline could be shut down, could be taken out of the ground, even could be capped. That’s a decision that will be waiting on Kamala Harris’s desk if she’s president next spring.

Ending fossil fuel subsidies is another really critical piece here. We have to stop sending tens of billions of dollars a year towards making the problem worse and start redirecting that money toward a livable future.

Maximillian Alvarez:  And last question, man. For folks out there, voters who are thinking about this as, well, that’s a distant issue. This is not an immediate issue like stopping a second Trump presidency, or for people who are still caught in that mental frame, what would you want folks out there to know who are going to maybe see this and recoil at first? What is the climate justice movement’s message to people about why they need to care about this now, in this election and beyond?

Collin Rees:  Yeah. I think not only is this an issue that is critical here at home, we’re seeing the mounting climate impacts. This is a crucial effort issue in which global leadership is sorely needed. The US is falling behind all its peer nations in terms of these commitments to phase out fossil fuels. This is an area where America can lead and can work for that brighter future, but it’s not guaranteed. We’re not going to get there unless we actively take those steps.

I guess I would just say the other thing here is that I think there’s this false perception, frankly, bought by the fossil fuel industry and its donations, that climate is a losing issue or that tackling the fossil fuel industry is not popular politically.

That couldn’t be further from the truth. We have very good polling and data showing large majorities of the American people want to take down the fossil fuel industry. People don’t like big oil. People don’t like Exxon fucking up their water. People don’t like Chevron polluting their communities. People don’t like these companies and the oil industry making their lives a living hell.

A majority of Pennsylvanians want to ban fracking. This is something where the American people are very much on the side of aggressive action, and the only people who don’t want that action is the American Petroleum Institute, is the fossil fuel industry lobby.

The Olympics weren’t the only place new world records were set this summer. Across the globe, sweltering temperatures shattered previous climate records. As the climate crisis continues, these new records will only be broken time and again. The impact is already being felt on the world of sports, and the effects will only become more acute with time. Climate and sports scholar Dr. Madeleine Orr speaks with Edge of Sports from the streets of Paris to discuss what the future of sports, and the Olympics, could look like in a rapidly warming world.

Studio Production: Jules Boykoff
Post-Production: David Hebden, Adam Coley

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Dave Zirin:

Hey, this is Dave Zirin, here at Edge of Sports TV, only on The Real News Network, coming to you from Olympic Paris. Thrilled to have with me on the show someone who’s been on in the past and we all know the number, she did great, and so we’re thrilled to have her back on with us. Madeleine Orr, author of Warming Up: How Climate Change is Changing Sports. Madeleine, thank you so much for talking to us here in Paris.

Madeleine Orr:

What a city, and I’m happy to be here.

Dave Zirin:

That’s awesome. That train is going by right now, and that just makes this more authentic. So Madeleine, real quick, just give us a sense of the main thrust of your book, please.

Madeleine Orr:

So my book is about what happens when climate change starts to impact the sports we love, whether it’s the athletes, the events, the teams, the venues, and we’re starting to see that. We’re seeing it in the Seine this week. The water quality is still gross. The air quality has been very mediocre in Paris the last few days. The heat is noticeable. We’re starting to get some hot days. Today was pretty hot. It’s only going to get hotter from here. So we’re seeing those impacts happen and we’re seeing it not just in summer sports, but winter sports as well, and pro sports around the world.

Dave Zirin:

Wow. So based on everything we’re seeing in Paris, the big question, can the Olympics be environmentally sustainable?

Madeleine Orr:

So Paris is a spectacle, and if you walk around the city right now, you might notice that there are streets blocked off. There are entire sections where you can’t approach. We’re on a street right now that is blocked off to cars and there is gendarmerie, the police, standing at the edge, making sure you can’t get in here. So massive disruption, and that’s because they’re bringing in 15 million tourists, and on top of 15,000 athletes and all of the staff and volunteers. So you can imagine there’s no version of bringing that many people to one place, for what’s functionally a big party, that’s going to be sustainable. That’s an oxymoron. A sustainable Olympics is an oxymoron and the model is completely untenable. They’re not going to be able to continue to do it for much longer.

Dave Zirin:

Well, our show is based in the United States and of course 2028, the Olympics go to Los Angeles. What message do you have via sustainability for people in LA?

Madeleine Orr:

If you live in LA, please get public transit. Get on them for public transit, it’s the best thing you can do, not just for your city, for yourselves, for your well-being, for your health, for your community, but also for everyone who’s going to inevitably descend on Los Angeles. Second thing you want to do is pressure them to have tickets for locals. Make sure they sell you tickets first. And when they do that, we can lower the number of international tourists that descend, and that reduces that carbon footprint. So that would be number one and two. Keep holding them to their promises. They said they’d have a sustainable games. It’s not possible to do that, but you should hold them to every promise they’ve made in terms of the little stuff, the bus lanes, the bike lanes, the pedestrian areas, all this stuff. Make them do it.

Dave Zirin:

Wow. Now I want my audience to know that you’re not just somebody who writes books, not just somebody who is a university professor, but you’re actually connected with a lot of these athletes who are dealing with political issues, and also with the issues of how they manage environmental catastrophe and world-class sport. I know, I’m not going to ask you to name names of the athletes who you’ve been speaking with, but can you speak a little bit about that work?

Madeleine Orr:

Sure. So in the last three, four years, there’s been groups of athletes organizing behind closed doors. So in Zoom calls, and LinkedIn groups, and WhatsApp groups, trying to figure out how do we take on the powers that be and get our message heard on things like sustainability, on things like racism, on things like Palestinian liberation. And those efforts are really interesting and beautiful to see. Now, it’s not easy for athletes to do that if, for example, they compete for a team like USA whose government is aligned strategically with Israel and has been supporting Israel, or Canada, where I come from, one of the big sponsors and they’ve just extended for eight years is Petro-Can. So very hard to talk about sustainability in that context.

Dave Zirin:

Wow.

Madeleine Orr:

So what’s happening there is they’ve solicited, I guess, a few of us academics to help them on the backend, fact check their messaging, support them in how they’re going to talk about it, and make sure that they feel confident when they go and create their activist work.

Dave Zirin:

Wow. Do you see a day in the near future where an Olympics are called and they quite literally cannot happen because of the climate?

Madeleine Orr:

I think that’s going to happen on the winter side sooner than we think.

Dave Zirin:

Wow.

Madeleine Orr:

I think we’ll get through in the next couple rounds, but if they don’t start really culling where they’re going to go, we are going to see places be too hot to host the Winter Games. And on the summer side, 2016 study out of the UK said, “Actually there’s maybe a dozen cities across the Northern Hemisphere that will be tenable to host the games by mid-century if it continues to be in July and August.” So we’re either going to see a scaled down games or we’re going to see a games in the shoulder season, so not summer as we know it, but a May, June, or a September, October, or we’re going to see them go away. Something’s got a give.

Dave Zirin:

Staggering. I know you’ve done a lot of media, but do you feel like the message that you have is getting out there and is part of the conversation around the Olympics? It seems to me it’s the question, will we have an Olympics? Only if we’re in some way heal the planet and radically refigure what we mean by international sports competition. Do you feel like this is a discussion, a debate that you’re seeing in the broader media landscape?

Madeleine Orr:

I think every Olympics has the discussion, right? There’s a discussion every time. In Rio it was inequality and then it was Zika virus. In Tokyo it was COVID, and here I think we’re finally having a conversation about sustainability. Is it as robust a conversation as I would hope we’re having in public? No, it’s still a lot of greenwashing, but it’s starting to be on the tip of people’s tongues. We’re starting to talk about what’s this going to look like in the context of a world on fire? And it’s important that we have that conversation, that we ask those questions, that we keep pushing the organizers.

Dave Zirin:

And then just the last question is about greenwashing. I’m hoping you can explain what that means-

Madeleine Orr:

Sure.

Dave Zirin:

… in the context of the sustainability message that comes from the International Olympic Committee.

Madeleine Orr:

Yeah. So there’s two versions of greenwashing at the Olympic level that are really nefarious. The first one is, they will tell you that these are a sustainable Olympic Games and, y’all, that’s not possible. It doesn’t exist. So they’re labeling things as sustainable because really there’s nobody to tell them not to, so they’re just using it. The other thing they do is they use a lesser of two evils argument. And this is also really pretty nasty, where they’ll say, “Oh, well these other Olympics in the past had a carbon footprint of X. We aren’t going to have that.” Well, that doesn’t mean your games are suddenly sustainable because it’s slightly better than that other thing. The bar for these things, frankly, is on the floor. And so any action is good and we want to see more of it, but you can’t jump from awful to slightly less awful and all of a sudden call it good.

Dave Zirin:

Her name is Madeleine Orr, she’s the author of Warming Up: How Climate Change is Changing Sports. If you care about the future of sports, this is a book you have to read. Madeleine Orr, thank you so much for joining us here on Edge of Sports.

Madeleine Orr:

Thanks for having me.

A 42-year-old Black woman, Adrienne Boulware, has died in the custody of the California Department of Corrections at the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla. On July 4, prison guards exposed Boulware to extreme temperatures outdoors during a heatwave for 15 minutes, leaving her with just a small glass of water in the over 110 F heat. Boulware began to exhibit symptoms of heat exhaustion almost immediately after returning indoors. Two days later, she passed away while receiving medical care. Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura of the California Coalition for Women’s Prisoners joins Rattling the Bars to discuss Boulware’s tragic death, and what it reveals about the dangers prisons place incarcerated people in as the climate crisis intensifies. 

Studio / Post-Production: Cameron Granadino
Audio Post-Production: Alina Nehlich

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Mansa Musa:

Welcome to this edition of Rallying the Bars. I’m your host, Mansa Musa. It’d be unimaginable to think that if I left a dog in the car with the windows rolled up under these heating conditions that I would not be held accountable by the animal and Humane Society. But the same thing is taking place right now in California with the women in Central California Women’s Facility. The same thing is taking place right now where women are being held in environments where the heat has reached a temperature of 110. As a result, a woman has died, and not to say how many more will die or what the state of these women are at this current time. Joining me today is Elizabeth Nomura. Welcome, Nomura. Tell us a little bit about yourself and what organization you’re representing at this juncture.

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

Again, my name is Leesa Nomura. I am the statewide membership organizer for the California Coalition for Women Prisoners. We are a organization that’s been around for almost just shy of 30 years, and I have been a statewide organizer for close to three years, but have been connected with CCWP since I was incarcerated. And I’ve been home in January, it will be five years I have been released from prison. I am of Pacific Islander descent and I am very grateful to be here calling from Tonga Land, or commonly known as Los Angeles. Thank you for having me.

Mansa Musa:

Okay. Yeah. And thank you for that. Okay, so let’s get right into it. According to a report that just came out on July 6th, a woman died from heat exhaustion in Central California Women’s Facility. Talk about what’s going on with them conditions right now as we walk back through what happened with this system.

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

Yeah. Tragically, a 42-year-old black woman, a very good friend of mine, of our sisterhood inside, Adrienne Boulware, just shy of coming home next year. It was 4th of July and she was being released for her meds and the institution was locked down because of course, on the holidays, there’s a lack of staff. And so because of that, on those days, the institution will be locked down because of lack of staff. And so it was med time. She was popped out for her meds. And in the configuration of the institution, the meds are not distributed to the cells like in some of the men’s joints. They have to leave their room, walk out of the unit and walk across the yard to the medical unit, stand in line with all of the other folks from the yard, and then wait in line for their turn to go up to the med window and then get their meds and then walk back to the door and then wait for whenever the housing staff in their air-conditioned cop shop is to walk to the door and unlock it and let them in.

And so apparently what the story is from our folks inside who we have direct communication with and tell us that Adrienne was out there in addition to the time it took for her to stand out there, wait out there and be exposed to above 111 degrees, I believe it was that day. What the temperature is and what the feels like temperature is always different, right, especially in the armpit of California, which is central California. And so Adrienne is standing out there and they said about 15 minutes. She’s waiting, she’s looking at the CO, he’s seeing her, she’s seeing him, and he is leaving her out there. And the whole time, there’s no water, there’s nothing out there for her to drink. And the only water she’s had the whole entire time is a little cup.

Mansa Musa:

Right, they give you water with your meds.

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

They give you water, and that’s all she’s had that whole entire time. And so by the time she went inside, she was let in, went inside, she was suffering from heat exhaustion, she was sweating, her roommates were concerned for her, helped her into the room. She was shaking. In the configuration of these units, the rooms hold up to eight people and there’s a shower, a toilet, and two sinks in there so they have access to shower anytime in those cells. Her roommates helped her into the shower. She went in and once she went in there to try to cool off, she collapsed. And she collapsed and she became incoherent.

They said that her legs were shaking uncontrollably and they then called out for medical help, in which case the call-out for medical emergency is 222. So if you can imagine that scene, all of the roommates pounding on the door screaming [inaudible 00:06:37]. So it was very frantic, and they’re just trying to do the best they could because of course they’re the first responders.

Mansa Musa:

Right. You’re exactly right.

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

They’re doing the best they can to keep her coherent, to keep her there and to monitor her health at that time and see how she’s doing. And so finally, medical comes and takes her away and they don’t hear anything until they receive the word Saturday morning that she had passed.

Mansa Musa:

How long did it take? Okay, because like I said, I’ve been in this space. I did 48 years prior to being released. I got five years coming up. I’ll be out five years December the 5th, but I did 48 years. When I first went in the ’70s, you had fans on the wall. It was these steel cells. It’d be so hot that the paint would literally be peeling off the wall and we ain’t get no ice. Back then, you ain’t get no ice.

But talk about how long, first of all, how long did it take for them to respond before we go into unpacking the conditions? Because it’s my understanding this is not new to this environment. How long did it take for them to respond to her, to get to her before they was able to get her to a unit where she would get treated properly to your knowledge?

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

They said the total amount of time, it was about 12 minutes. So it took about three minutes for the CO to get down the hallway, unlock the door, assist the situation, hit the button, and then go to the door, let wait for the medical staff, bring the gurney, walk to them, and-

Mansa Musa:

Take another 15 minutes to get across to y’all.

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

Yeah, to get across the yard.

Mansa Musa:

So all together is a total of 35 to 40 minutes.

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

No, no, actually it wasn’t that long because remember, each yard has their own medical unit, has their own medical thing, so the nurses there came with a gurney. It was about 13 minutes.

Mansa Musa:

Yeah, it’s 13 minutes too long.

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

It’s 13 minutes too long. She’s already suffering.

Mansa Musa:

And the reality is, the reality is that, okay, we recognized and this is in the United States of America, this is not isolated to this California prison, we recognized that the heat wave was going across this country. We recognized… I was in Vegas and it was 115 and I went outside and I did something every three minutes and came back in. That’s how burned the heat was. But it wasn’t so much the heat, it was just like the lack of air. It was just like not told. So I know from experience, but more importantly, I know from experience from being in that space.

Talk about now… My understanding is that this is not the first time that this institution or the California prisons has been cited for not being prepared to deal with the heat or elements, period. Talk about, to your knowledge, has it changed? How long did you do before you was released?

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

I did 10 years.

Mansa Musa:

All right, so you can walk us back. So has the conditions staying there, have they gotten any better during the course of your incarceration?

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

No, they’ve only progressively gotten worse because of course the equipment is becoming more and more dilapidated and over time and it hasn’t been replaced. And I worked on those maintenance crews that did the preventative maintenance that’s supposed to happen every winter in preparation for the summer. So I know what those preventative maintenance procedures look like. They’re just walkthroughs and just procedural and just checkoffs as opposed to actually things being really done to actually prepare. And so those cooling units or those swamp coolers actually are not doing the jobs that they’re doing.

Mansa Musa:

So what exactly are they for our audience? Because I know they got… I told you, the women at the correction at the county, the detention center in Baltimore City, they had got an injunction. They brought coolers, what you see on the football fields. They grown a cooling station. They grown and ran these pipes and ran these conduits all through the prison was popping in air the whole entire time because it got so hot that they didn’t have the amenities that modern prison have in terms of fans or air or be able to cool down the [inaudible 00:12:08], So they was able to get that done. So talk about what they got compared to what they should have.

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

So they have swamp cooler systems that sit at the top of the roofs of every unit. However, those units, those units are connected to piping systems that pump water because of course swamp coolers need a flow of water in order for them to work. So what’s happened is that each of those units, when you run them, now the water leaks into the ceilings and now they leak into the buildings when they run them and cause more problems. And now you have leaking into the day rooms, leaking into the rooms, and so they’re causing more issues where the ceilings are falling in.

So what they end up doing is they end up not running them because of the fact that they know they’re going to cause more problems in the end and then they don’t have the people to come in or they don’t want to repair them and so they just don’t run it. And so they refuse to run or they run the air but not the water or the cut off the water line and just run the air but what ends up happening is the air will run, but after a while because the water’s not running, the engine will run hot and then it’ll pump out hot air.

Mansa Musa:

Hot air.

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

And so that’s what happened on Friday.

Mansa Musa:

Right. I see. Yeah.

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

That’s what ended up happening on Friday afternoon when we started Friday morning to get desperate pleas and cries for help. In the early morning hours of a lockdown status, we were getting… No, it was Saturday morning. Everyone had found out that Adrienne had passed away and they were all distraught about the passing, but then they were also all locked down and they were calling out to us and they were just getting ahold of all of us advocates saying, “We are locked down and the vents are pumping out hot air and we can’t breathe,” and they were saying, “We can’t breathe,” and then women were throwing up, they were having headaches, leg pain.

Mansa Musa:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Heat exhaustion.

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

And already it’s 113 that day, so the pipes were all running hot. They had no ice water because all of the ice machines in the institution except for one were all broke down. So they had no access to ice water, lack of staff, so nobody was out there trying to-

Mansa Musa:

Get ice.

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

… solve the problem or get ice or make any phone calls outside to get any ice shipped in. And so nobody cared. And so everyone’s locked in their cells, up to eight people in a room, and then to add insult to injury, they’re pumping in hot air-

Mansa Musa:

Hot air.

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

… from these things and they’re not even popping the doors open so that people can breathe. And half of the staff there that doesn’t give a crap is ignoring the women asking and begging to at least be let out a hallway by hallway to breathe in the day room. They’re not going to stab them. This is not the men’s joint. This is the women’s institution. All they want to do is just come out hallway by hallway.

Mansa Musa:

Breathe, so they can breathe.

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

Let them get some reprieve out of these ovens, I mean, these practical death chambers that are… I mean, it’s just crazy because not only… I mean, it would be better to be outside in 113 degree weather where you can actually breathe air and to be confined in a space that has no windows, no ventilation and then you’re pumping in hot air on top of that on top of breathing the air from your friend that’s-

Mansa Musa:

Everybody, all air being sucked up.

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

… pressed up against you.

Mansa Musa:

Yeah. Let me ask you this, Elizabeth. Okay, you just outlined that this been going on for a minute, right? Why haven’t they fixed this? Because we’re talking about at least it’s been in existence for at least five years, this system of cooling, air, water, cold air. Hot summer, California, always going to be hot. The environment ain’t going to change. You ain’t going to put no windows in it, you ain’t going to knock no windows off. You ain’t going to do none of that. You ain’t going to bring no air conditioning. Why haven’t this changed? What is the reason why the state of California has not invested money into changing this situation?

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

They don’t care. They don’t care.

Mansa Musa:

All right. What’s the status of the environment now? Since now we got death and potential deaths on the way or potential irreversible injuries because of heat exhaustion, what is being done now by the California State Prison system, the Department of Correction in California? Because this ain’t only… If they got this attitude towards women prison, and this is a general attitude towards prisoners in general, women prisoners, men prisoners, juvenile prisoners, kid prisoners, prisoners in general, you going to die, well, so be it.

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

Right? I mean, so in terms of California Department of Corrections, or specifically for what has happened following our advocacy at CCWF, we had immediately after these cries for help, we immediately put out a press release in response to Adrienne’s passing or Adrienne’s death, and also too, putting out specifically the cries for help, and we did it quoting folks and quoting the emails and text messages we were receiving with their permission. And we put it out to every news agency that would listen to us and all of our social media, all of our social media platforms so that folks could see and we could get as much support that we could in the general public.

And the response was overwhelming. We went viral within the hour of placing that out. And so I spent the good part of the rest of that day and the following next day doing interviews and talking with people and sharing just the stories of my folks on the inside, what they were going through and how it consistently continues to be this way year after year, summer after summer, and they’re burning them up in the summer and freezing them out in the winter.

Mansa Musa:

Yeah, freezing them out in the winter.

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

That’s how it is. And it never changes. And so in response to our advocacy, our ongoing pressure that we were putting on CDCR and the administration there at the institution, they had immediately went to work on getting those ice machines back online. They immediately went to work on purchasing additional igloos so that each unit could have two igloos at all times. And then they immediately started to open up each of the trailers that have a AC units in those trailers that they usually have like NA, AA classes.

Mansa Musa:

I got you, I got you.

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

So they open those up as cooling stations when the temperatures go up, when they go up to above 90 degrees. So these things have aggressively gotten better. However, in order for those igloos to be filled with ice and filled with water, to get those in there, you have to have staff that want to do it. So then we’re getting those staff members that are petty, and so then we’re finding out, oh, we’re getting staff that will fill the ice chest with 80% water and only a small scoop of ice and then by the time you get the igloo from the kitchen to the unit, that thing is already melted, so that’s the kind of attitude you get from inside from people from those, I’m sorry, from those pigs, that don’t give a crap-

Mansa Musa:

Yes, yes, they are.

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

… that don’t give a crap and they’re retaliating against for what? For people, all they’re trying to do is stay alive and they don’t want to give people that right to advocate for their own lives. They’re not asking for much, they’re just asking [inaudible 00:22:26]-

Mansa Musa:

Let me ask you this, what’s the security status of that particular concentration camp?

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

Well, women’s prisons… Well, this particular women’s prison is the highest security women’s prison.

Mansa Musa:

So it’s max? It’s max medium?

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

Yeah, because actually, CCWF was the only institution in the state that housed death row.

Mansa Musa:

Okay, so it’s max medium.

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

So you had everyone from death row to level ones.

Mansa Musa:

Right, right. Let me offer this though, for clarity, right? The sister that passed away, her name was Adrienne?

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

Adrienne Boulware.

Mansa Musa:

Well, Adrienne was murdered. That wasn’t-

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

Yes, yes.

Mansa Musa:

That’s murder. There’s no way you can describe that but when you take [inaudible 00:23:15]-

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

Let me be clear that the institution and CDCRs went on the record to state that she had passed away from a preexisting health condition.

Mansa Musa:

Yeah. The preexisting health condition was neglect of taking care of me and providing me with the adequate medical attention that I need. That’s neglect, neglect turned into murder. But okay, going forward.

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

In any heat advisory in the free world that comes up on every billboard, on every [inaudible 00:23:48], when they tell you to be aware or be careful, they tell you to be careful in this heat of your family members and your elderly who have what? Preexisting health conditions.

Mansa Musa:

Right, and-

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

They’re at risk.

Mansa Musa:

And then we not confused by this because we recognize that if she was in society and left in a car by anybody under the same conditions and died, they would lock them up for a homicide or involuntary manslaughter. So the fact that she was held on a plantation, under the new form of plantation, prison industrial complex, the fact that she was in that environment, they tend to minimize her existence and her being a human being, but we here to tell them right now that this is murder.

And I’m imploring y’all to at some point in time come to that place where y’all try to get some redress around that, around why did she have to die, because as you said earlier, okay, they’re putting these things into place, which is good, but the fact of the matter is if you don’t change the attitude of the pigs, if you don’t change the attitude of the institution, then somebody else is waiting in the wings to die and they justify it by saying, “Oh, they died because they had preexisting conditions and it wasn’t the fact that we was neglectful in getting them treatment or putting them in an environment that did not exasperate these preexisting conditions. That ain’t had nothing to do with it. It was just the fact that they wasn’t healthy and their health contributed to them dying.” But going forward, what do you want our audience to know?

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

So basically what I would like your audience to know is that California Coalition for Women Prisoners is not done with this fight. We are going to take this fight to the legislative level and we are going to take specific asks to the legislation and these asks are going to look like short-term asks, but also some long-term asks. At the short-term level, we want every person inside every institution in California to be given state-issued cooling rags. Such an easy thing. Just cooling rags, just something that could provide immediate relief that you and I and the free world no big deal could get at the 99 Cent Store.

Also, too, is that we want also state-issued fans issued to every person that’s incarcerated. That is not a hard ask because a fan that’s issued is cheap. They are not expensive compared to the medical expense to deal with heat-related issues that come up because of the heat, extreme heat. Issuing a fan upon a person’s intake or person being booked into the prison is actually a cheap ask. If any legislator wants to push back on that because of budget, that is one of our asks.

The other thing is we want cold water dispensers accessible in every unit and not cheaply. We want it always to stay cold. So we want that to be accessible and we don’t want it held back from anyone in any lockdown situation. If someone needs that water, there needs to be a protocol in a way that that person, whether they’re in their cell or outside, be able to access that water or get that-

Mansa Musa:

Yeah, water. We talking about water, cold water.

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

[inaudible 00:27:38] at any time they need.

Mansa Musa:

That’s all. Yeah. Cold water. That’s all. Cold water.

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

Cold water and not tepid water. They can get that from the [inaudible 00:27:46]-

Mansa Musa:

Yeah, we asking them for cold water. Cold water, that’s all.

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

Cold ice water.

Mansa Musa:

We didn’t ask for you to go melt the ice glacier to bring it in there and import it from Alaska. We just asking you to make the water cold and give us access to it as we need it. Come on.

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

So long-term asks, we would like AC, not swamp coolers.

Mansa Musa:

Yeah, we want the same thing they getting cool with. Same thing they getting cool with. We want the same thing.

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

We want two units installed because the inclement weather is not getting any better. Climate change is causing it to get worse. And so it’s unavoidable. AC units must be installed in every unit in every prison, and I’m just saying starting with the Central Valley, because the weather there is more clocked 100 degree weather, simultaneous 100 degree weather in the Central Valley than any area of California statistically. So that’s a great place to start.

And I will say this. I received Intel that a year ago the institution had purchased brand new chillers and signed a contract to have those installed and installed one in one unit in the institution and somehow ran out of the funds to install any chillers.

Mansa Musa:

Yeah, what happened to the money? What happened to the money? Yeah.

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

All of those chillers are sitting in the warehouse.

Mansa Musa:

Yeah. What happened to that money? Yeah. What happened to that money?

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

What happened to that money? Who misappropriated those funds to complete the installation project and why did Adrienne have to die because of it?

Mansa Musa:

Yeah. And also, I think that y’all need to ask that they do an internal investigation on that right there because this been going on far too long.

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

Don’t you worry about the thing, brother. I got that.

Mansa Musa:

See, one thing, I just recently became aware of it but this been going on for a while and then Adrienne was murdered. Her murder should be the reason why they should feel like they should be hard-pressed to resolve it. But how can our audience get in touch with you and support what y’all are doing?

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

Well, right now, the Adrienne Boulware family is asking for support to help them not only with funeral expenses, but they would like to fund their own independent autopsy. And so we are assisting them in supporting their GoFundMe fundraiser. And so I do have a link for that. I will forward that to you if you don’t already have it already, and also to an ongoing support of the work that CCWP has. CCWP, California Coalition for Women Prisoners dot org, is our webpage and you can connect with us or you can also connect with us on our Instagram @ccwp and that’s our Instagram handle.

Mansa Musa:

Thank you, Liz. And there you have it, real news rattling the bars. This is not a big ask. Just imagine somebody asking you say, “Listen, just give me a wet rag, cool wet rag to put on my head to lower my temperature.” That’s not a big ask. Just imagine somebody ask, you say, “Can I just get a cold drink of water?” That’s not a big ask. All the women in California ask to be treated like human beings. And as a result of being treated inhuman, someone has been murdered, not died from preexisting conditions, but died from the fact that they was neglected. We ask that you look into this. We ask that you evaluate this report and support the women in the California prison system, but more importantly, we ask that you write your congressmen or get involved with this because this is a problem. There you have it. Rattling the bars, the real news. Thank you.

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

Thank you.